The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #642 - Rich Roll

00:00:02.000 Are we live?

00:00:03.000 Oh my goodness.

00:00:04.000 Rich Roll, ladies and gentlemen.

00:00:05.000 How are you, buddy?

00:00:06.000 Good, man.

00:00:07.000 Good to see you.

00:00:07.000 What's cracking?

00:00:08.000 Happy to be here, man.

00:00:09.000 Thanks for having me back.

00:00:10.000 I hope that's in my honor.

00:00:12.000 Sort of.

00:00:12.000 I drink it every day, but it helps.

00:00:15.000 Where'd you pick that up?

00:00:16.000 Juicy Lady. 0.94

00:00:17.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:00:18.000 You know where that is?

00:00:19.000 I do.

00:00:19.000 I go there all the time.

00:00:20.000 I love that place.

00:00:20.000 Yeah, me too.

00:00:21.000 I wish I'd changed the name of it, but Juicy Ladies, I don't know. 0.98

00:00:25.000 Why?

00:00:26.000 I think a lady owns it. 1.00

00:00:27.000 Yeah, no, she's cool, actually.

00:00:28.000 Maybe she's juicy? 0.83

00:00:29.000 Yeah, the food there is pretty good. 0.53

00:00:31.000 It's a little sexual.

00:00:32.000 Yeah.

00:00:32.000 The name, right?

00:00:34.000 Is it an assault to your masculinity?

00:00:36.000 No.

00:00:36.000 No, I'm cool with it, but some weaker men might have an issue.

00:00:39.000 Yeah, you have to be self-assured.

00:00:42.000 You have to be strong enough to go in there and order vegan food.

00:00:44.000 They do, but they make a good green juice.

00:00:46.000 Yeah, they make a lot of good stuff there.

00:00:47.000 It's a good spot.

00:00:48.000 There's more and more of those places that are opening up.

00:00:50.000 It's true.

00:00:51.000 You hear that McDonald's is going to offer a kale shake?

00:00:53.000 No way.

00:00:54.000 Yes.

00:00:54.000 I've not heard that.

00:00:55.000 Yes.

00:00:56.000 The world's changing.

00:00:58.000 Something's working.

00:00:59.000 People are getting nutrients in their body.

00:01:00.000 It's crazy.

00:01:01.000 Starbucks has them now.

00:01:02.000 Starbucks has what?

00:01:03.000 Kale shakes. 1.00

00:01:04.000 Get the fuck out of here. 0.99

00:01:04.000 Do they? 0.99

00:01:05.000 I didn't know that. 0.99

00:01:05.000 Get the fuck out of here. 0.99

00:01:07.000 Take those Evo green things and mix it up with yogurt and fresh kale if you wanted to. 0.98

00:01:11.000 But why would they put yogurt in it?

00:01:13.000 Because it's McDonald's.

00:01:14.000 It makes it a smoothie.

00:01:15.000 Oh, Starbucks?

00:01:16.000 Oh, it makes it a smoothie.

00:01:17.000 Well, you know, the market will dictate it if people want it.

00:01:22.000 Yeah.

00:01:22.000 It's sort of like when you talk about conspiracy theories with evil corporations.

00:01:26.000 It's like they're responding to what people want, you know?

00:01:29.000 That is true.

00:01:29.000 If people want it, they're going to start making it.

00:01:31.000 That's the whole conspiracy with, like, really shitty television shows, too. 0.99

00:01:35.000 Like, people are like, man, they're trying to make us dumb. 1.00

00:01:37.000 Nope, we're already dumb. 1.00

00:01:38.000 Yeah. 0.95

00:01:40.000 All you have to do is look at the ratings and see what people are actually watching, and they're responding to that.

00:01:45.000 Well, people are tired.

00:01:46.000 They get home from work.

00:01:48.000 They're exhausted.

00:01:49.000 They don't want to watch Cosmos.

00:01:50.000 Or some of them do.

00:01:51.000 I do.

00:01:52.000 But some people just want to zone out and watch Honey Boo Boo.

00:01:56.000 I don't think that's on anymore, right?

00:01:57.000 Is that not on anymore?

00:01:58.000 There's always a new one.

00:02:00.000 We got rid of our TVs.

00:02:02.000 What?

00:02:03.000 Who are you?

00:02:03.000 Like a year ago.

00:02:04.000 What?

00:02:05.000 Believe me, I did not want to do it.

00:02:07.000 It was not my idea.

00:02:09.000 I was quite vociferous in opposing that idea.

00:02:13.000 That was my wife's idea. 1.00

00:02:14.000 But actually, it's just like anything else.

00:02:16.000 You adjust to it.

00:02:17.000 I mean, I still watch Netflix, and I watch the shows I like to watch, and now I don't miss it.

00:02:23.000 I've been traveling a lot, and when you're in hotel rooms, you turn the TV on, and I have a zero-tolerance policy for...

00:02:30.000 Commercials now like I just I'm like really, you know, and I just turn the TV off and Go back online. 0.97

00:02:36.000 Yeah commercials are fucking brutal whoever invented the idea of stopping a show every 15 minutes for three minutes or whatever the hell it is for commercials That's awful.

00:02:46.000 Well, it's crazy how you acclimate to that because as a kid, you know think about how many hours of your life You know, we're just basically watching commercials Well, you know what happened though? 0.99

00:02:57.000 DVRs. 1.00

00:02:58.000 DVRs made commercials really stupid. 1.00

00:03:00.000 But that's still, I mean, we're about the same age, right? 0.99

00:03:01.000 So that's still a recent development in our life.

00:03:04.000 Yeah.

00:03:04.000 You know?

00:03:05.000 Most of our formative years was terrible television commercials.

00:03:09.000 Yeah, I got my first TiVo in the early 2000s.

00:03:12.000 It was like a standalone unit that hooked up to DirecTV.

00:03:17.000 I think it was, I want to say like 2003 or something like that, and I was like, this is amazing!

00:03:22.000 You can pause the TV! You know, you could pause it, you could go take a leak, you could record things, you could find, search things, and have them on a schedule, because I fucking, I had probably 10 VCRs in my life and never figured out how to record one of those bitches. 1.00

00:03:40.000 It's just flashing 12 o'clock. 0.98

00:03:43.000 I never scheduled one of them.

00:03:45.000 I never had one of them scheduled.

00:03:46.000 I don't think anybody figured that out.

00:03:47.000 Some people must have.

00:03:48.000 But it's cool how it's changing.

00:03:50.000 I mean, you know, to see how, you know, what's going on with Netflix and Amazon and all that kind of stuff.

00:03:55.000 And most recently, what Tim Ferriss has done with his show.

00:03:59.000 Have you followed that at all?

00:04:02.000 So, Tim had a show called The Tim Ferriss Experiment, and it aired on...

00:04:06.000 I can't remember what...

00:04:08.000 Yeah, it was like another channel that was part of the CNN family.

00:04:12.000 Right, like Headline News or something?

00:04:13.000 Yeah, it wasn't Headline News.

00:04:14.000 It was something like that.

00:04:15.000 It went under, right?

00:04:16.000 And so, his show was...

00:04:18.000 I don't know how many episodes it aired, but certainly not the entire 13 of the season.

00:04:23.000 And then it was just, you know, how it is in entertainment, like, you're just done, right?

00:04:27.000 They own the show, and even though they were all taped and locked and completed, nobody had seen them.

00:04:32.000 And somehow, he was able to get his show back, and he, I don't know, you know, through lawyering or what have you, And bought the rights back, got his show, and cut a deal with iTunes.

00:04:45.000 And it's premiered on iTunes this past week.

00:04:47.000 And I think it's like the top-ranked TV show on iTunes now.

00:04:52.000 I wonder if their TV show rankings, though, are just like their podcast rankings.

00:04:58.000 Well, who knows how the iTunes algorithm works.

00:05:00.000 Well, it's definitely not based on the number of downloads.

00:05:03.000 No, it's definitely not.

00:05:04.000 It's based on new...

00:05:06.000 Like, it takes precedent, new subscribers, and also comments.

00:05:13.000 So, like, Chelsea Peretti had the number one podcast in the country, and she hadn't even released an episode yet.

00:05:19.000 Right.

00:05:19.000 So, zero had been downloaded, because people had subscribed.

00:05:23.000 And they also...

00:05:23.000 They over-inflate new shows.

00:05:26.000 So when somebody premieres a show with one or two episodes, it's super high up for a while before it settles into where it should be.

00:05:34.000 Well, I think that's good because it doesn't keep anybody from downloading other shows that are already popular.

00:05:39.000 And it does give new shows a window.

00:05:43.000 But you'll see people, I'm number one!

00:05:45.000 You'll see these brands, come on, man.

00:05:48.000 Do you know what that means?

00:05:49.000 What are your numbers?

00:05:51.000 How many downloads do you get?

00:05:52.000 Because you're definitely not Number one there.

00:05:54.000 It's weird.

00:05:55.000 The rankings is weird.

00:05:56.000 It goes all over the place.

00:05:57.000 Like my show this week, it's got a banner on the top carousel of iTunes on the iTunes homepage for podcasts.

00:06:05.000 So my numbers went way up this week in overall rankings.

00:06:10.000 But I know that's not real.

00:06:12.000 It'll settle back down.

00:06:14.000 It will, but it won't.

00:06:15.000 It will, but it'll build.

00:06:17.000 I remember when we first started doing this podcast, I don't know what our downloads were.

00:06:22.000 There were nothing, though.

00:06:23.000 It was like, you know, a few thousand here or there.

00:06:25.000 And then one day it was like, oh, we're getting a million downloads a month.

00:06:29.000 What?

00:06:30.000 A million?

00:06:31.000 And now it's somewhere around 14 million.

00:06:33.000 Is it really?

00:06:34.000 Yeah.

00:06:34.000 What's your average download per show?

00:06:37.000 Can you talk about that?

00:06:37.000 It depends.

00:06:38.000 It depends on the show.

00:06:40.000 There's all the different things.

00:06:42.000 There's iTunes.

00:06:43.000 Then there's the raw MP3 that you can download.

00:06:46.000 There's Stitcher, which is really hard to track.

00:06:48.000 Yeah, you don't know what's going on there.

00:06:50.000 Stitcher only takes one.

00:06:51.000 They'll give you numbers, but you don't chase it down.

00:06:54.000 What they do is Stitcher is an application for cell phones that allows...

00:06:59.000 They take a podcast and they lower the bit rate.

00:07:03.000 They make it a much smaller file.

00:07:05.000 So they only download one episode.

00:07:07.000 But then it gets distributed...

00:07:09.000 Through their system, you know, I don't know how many times.

00:07:13.000 So then there's that.

00:07:14.000 Then there's Ustream, which is a few thousand, usually.

00:07:18.000 And then there's YouTube, which is tens, if not hundreds of thousands.

00:07:22.000 Usually hundreds of thousands.

00:07:24.000 And then, it's never tens of thousands.

00:07:28.000 And then Vimeo.

00:07:31.000 So, altogether, it's usually around a million in an episode, depending on the episode.

00:07:36.000 Crazy.

00:07:37.000 Yeah, it could be more.

00:07:37.000 These are crazy numbers.

00:07:38.000 Yeah.

00:07:40.000 Powerful deal, right?

00:07:40.000 Well, it's just a number thing.

00:07:42.000 It's just, you keep doing it, have interesting people, like, Rich Roll, ladies and gentlemen!

00:07:48.000 Have interesting people on, have funny conversations, fun conversations, and just keep doing it, you know?

00:07:53.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:07:53.000 And it builds.

00:07:54.000 I just listened to your episode with Sam Harris from the other day.

00:07:59.000 That guy's captivating.

00:08:01.000 He's such an interesting dude.

00:08:02.000 He's a very intelligent, very cool guy.

00:08:04.000 I want to get him together with Abby Martin, though.

00:08:07.000 Abby's not down.

00:08:08.000 Get them both in the same room.

00:08:09.000 I'm sure your phone rang from her after that show.

00:08:12.000 I got a few text messages.

00:08:14.000 We went back and forth.

00:08:15.000 She's my friend.

00:08:16.000 I'm very good friends with her.

00:08:17.000 And I'm good friends with Sam, too.

00:08:18.000 I like both of them.

00:08:19.000 Well, Sam's got a next-level brain.

00:08:22.000 Yeah, he's very smart.

00:08:23.000 Whether you agree with him or not, he has an incredible acuity to present an argument and support it and communicate it in a very clear and calm way.

00:08:33.000 He's also very honest.

00:08:35.000 You know, like if he's communicating an argument, he is not doing it to be deceptive.

00:08:39.000 These are his actual feelings and thoughts and agree with them or not agreeing with them.

00:08:43.000 This is his point of view.

00:08:45.000 As is hers. 0.67

00:08:46.000 I respect both of them very much.

00:08:49.000 I'm in the middle between both of them as well.

00:08:52.000 I'm not necessarily 100% her side.

00:08:54.000 I'm not necessarily 100% his side.

00:08:59.000 You're talking about death and war.

00:09:01.000 And anytime you can find any way to minimize or trivialize that, it's easily open for argument, open for criticism.

00:09:11.000 So that's why I see her point of view, but I also see his point of view. 1.00

00:09:14.000 There's a lot of fucking crazy people in the world. 1.00

00:09:16.000 A lot of awful, terrible people. 1.00

00:09:18.000 There's a lot of really dangerous ideologies that are being passed around and have been passed around for a long time, and the people that are embedded in these ideologies...

00:09:27.000 I'm married to them.

00:09:28.000 They're very, very committed to it.

00:09:30.000 And, you know, I see his point of view.

00:09:31.000 He knows what he's talking about, and so does she.

00:09:33.000 So it's crazy, you know?

00:09:35.000 Well, a couple things.

00:09:36.000 I mean, first of all, I'm always impressed with how you kind of navigate the treacherous waters of having guests on that you may disagree with, which may be me today.

00:09:45.000 I don't know, but...

00:09:46.000 You know, sort of, you'll have people with differing point of views, sometimes extreme, sometimes not, and the way that you kind of have to gracefully, like as a podcast host myself, that's always a challenge, you know, like how do you have a respectful, engaging conversation, but also make sure that you're asking the right questions so that you're not just people pleasing the whole time.

00:10:07.000 Well, I don't think there's anything wrong with this agreeing with someone, you know?

00:10:10.000 And I don't think there's anything wrong with having a pleasant conversation with someone whose views you don't share.

00:10:15.000 I think two people can be diametrically opposed on certain issues, but still be nice to each other.

00:10:22.000 I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

00:10:23.000 And I think when I talk to someone, Who doesn't share my opinions or has differing opinions?

00:10:29.000 I try to relax whatever part of me wants to argue with that and just try to figure out what is it, where are they coming from?

00:10:39.000 You know, what's their point of view based on?

00:10:41.000 Is it logical?

00:10:42.000 Is it emotional?

00:10:43.000 Is it objective?

00:10:45.000 You know, where are they at?

00:10:48.000 You know?

00:10:49.000 And also, I like to play...

00:10:51.000 Like, sometimes people say, yeah, but you asked this and you asked that.

00:10:54.000 And like, sometimes I'll ask people things that I don't even believe what I'm saying.

00:10:58.000 What I'm trying to do is either play devil's advocate or argue the counterpoint.

00:11:04.000 Just to try to figure out where they're at.

00:11:06.000 Right.

00:11:06.000 And try to cover all the bases.

00:11:09.000 Because, especially when it comes to a controversial issue...

00:11:11.000 You know, you want to explore not just where a person's at, like what they're trying to say, but how did they come to that conclusion?

00:11:21.000 Right.

00:11:21.000 And in the case of Sam, I mean, he's traveled extensively.

00:11:24.000 He has firsthand experience with all these kinds of people.

00:11:28.000 So he has a basis for where he's coming from.

00:11:33.000 I was actually a funny story about him.

00:11:35.000 I've never met him.

00:11:36.000 I don't know him, but we were classmates.

00:11:38.000 We were in the same freshman class in college at Stanford.

00:11:44.000 Like I said, I don't know him, but we have mutual friends in common.

00:11:48.000 A couple guys that I'm close with that he's still close with.

00:11:51.000 And I was talking to one of them recently and he just said, we were talking about Sam because he's blown up and he's everywhere and, you know, he's so in Zeitgeist right now.

00:12:00.000 And he was telling me that in some freshman, I don't know if it was a freshman English class or something like that, that he, that Sam just distinguished himself immediately, like by challenging the professor and just everybody knew that he was on another level intellectually,

00:12:17.000 you know, at a young age. 0.96

00:12:19.000 Well, it's got to be very difficult if you're in college and you're taking classes from a person that you think is a dumbass, which does happen. 0.98

00:12:27.000 Right. 0.99

00:12:28.000 Right?

00:12:28.000 I mean, I had it happen in college.

00:12:31.000 I can clearly remember.

00:12:33.000 I forget what class it was in, but I can clearly remember going, oh, all right. 1.00

00:12:38.000 Well, now I have to just think only of the information, the actual numbers and the data that's being presented in this class, and ignore this person's opinion because they're a fucking idiot. 0.99

00:12:49.000 I believe it was either a philosophy class or a psychology class. 0.99

00:12:53.000 I don't even remember the exact circumstance, but...

00:12:55.000 Remember thinking like yeah, this is a real issue and then as I got older and I started paying attention to some of the things that get taught in school and some of the like very rigid Ideologies that some people especially like really super lefties like to impose on students and some of the ideas They try to impose on students are very it's very subjective ideas,

00:13:15.000 you know very very much personal opinions They get stuffed into kids heads and then you know it becomes an issue of whether or not Whether or not you want that in your head.

00:13:26.000 Are you going to get an A in this class if you disagree with this guy, but still present good arguments?

00:13:32.000 Or are you going to have to go along with the way this person is trying to portray the world in order to be graded accordingly?

00:13:39.000 I don't think critical thought is really taught to the extent that it should be in young people.

00:13:46.000 You know, we're on this, you know, our education system is about, you know, getting through as much information as possible and standardized testing and, you know, getting good grades and all that kind of thing.

00:13:57.000 And, you know, the idea that you should be questioning the ideas that are presented to you is really not something that is, you know, part of that world to the extent that I think it should be.

00:14:08.000 I agree and I also think that there's very little being taught especially at a high school level of how to think and Not just like this is mathematics.

00:14:19.000 This is the way you calculate things.

00:14:21.000 This is these are the facts of history that we're aware of instead of How do you deal with problems?

00:14:29.000 How do you address interpersonal relationships?

00:14:33.000 How do you look at yourself objectively?

00:14:37.000 Do you ever step back and try to look at yourself the way maybe someone else would and judge yourself in your own actions instead of protecting yourself with your ego?

00:14:49.000 And all those things that people do like almost naturally to protect themselves really wind up being traps.

00:14:55.000 They really wind up fucking you up, and you have to kind of clean up that mess as you get older.

00:15:00.000 Well, I mean, I guess that's supposed to be on the parents, but you know what I mean? 0.98

00:15:05.000 They don't know how to do it either.

00:15:07.000 Good luck with that.

00:15:09.000 I mean, life skills.

00:15:11.000 What about just, you know, learning how to navigate this crazy world that we're living in?

00:15:15.000 How about learning how to eat?

00:15:16.000 For me, the most important thing, you know, as a parent, it's like, I want my kids to be excited about life and to be excited about something, to figure out a way to be passionate about something.

00:15:27.000 Because if they have that motor...

00:15:28.000 That drive, that is like half the game right there.

00:15:32.000 And then also to have that ability to critically, you know, to want to learn.

00:15:37.000 The desire to learn is much more important than whatever you're learning.

00:15:40.000 Yeah, I agree.

00:15:41.000 So how do you make your kid enthusiastic about that, especially when they're getting beaten down?

00:15:46.000 You've got to find whatever it is that they're drawn to, right?

00:15:49.000 Mm-hmm.

00:15:50.000 Yeah.

00:15:51.000 So you expose them to a lot of things, and then when they find something that they kind of gravitate towards, your job is to support that.

00:15:57.000 At least that's how I see it.

00:15:58.000 Yeah, and then give them the opportunity to switch gears, too.

00:16:02.000 I remember when I was a kid, I would be into a lot of different things, and my parents would always be super resistant if I got into something else.

00:16:10.000 They'd be like, well, what about the other thing that you do?

00:16:12.000 I'm like, well, I want to do this now. 1.00

00:16:14.000 Stop fucking with me. 1.00

00:16:15.000 What were you into? 1.00

00:16:16.000 Well, initially, I was really into art. 0.97

00:16:20.000 Yeah, you're a crazy drawer.

00:16:22.000 That's what I used to do. 0.97

00:16:23.000 Yeah, all day long.

00:16:24.000 When I was really young, I wanted to be a comic book illustrator.

00:16:28.000 So I used to draw a lot.

00:16:30.000 And then when I was in my teenage years, I discovered martial arts.

00:16:35.000 And that's all I wanted to do.

00:16:36.000 And my parents were like, why do you want to do that?

00:16:38.000 Like, why are you doing that when you used to do this?

00:16:40.000 I'm like, because that's what I like now.

00:16:43.000 Can I just like that?

00:16:44.000 Also, that presupposes that you have to make a choice between two things.

00:16:48.000 Like, why do you have to define yourself by one of those?

00:16:51.000 Why couldn't you be my dad?

00:16:52.000 What happened?

00:16:53.000 Where were you when my mom was hot?

00:16:57.000 Yeah, I think there's, you know, a lot of it is people, you know, they're raising their kids, they just want the best for their kids.

00:17:06.000 They just maybe don't have the best ideas.

00:17:10.000 You know, they don't necessarily know.

00:17:12.000 And it's also like...

00:17:14.000 I mean, I was born in 1967, so my parents were basically cave people.

00:17:19.000 I mean, let's be realistic.

00:17:21.000 Like, people that were...

00:17:22.000 If you're born in 67, that means your parents were...

00:17:25.000 My parents were born in like 47, right?

00:17:29.000 My mom was like 20 when she had me. 0.99

00:17:31.000 So, 1947, that's fucking World War II, dude. 0.96

00:17:35.000 That means that her parents were born during World War I. Her parents came over on the boat from Italy. 0.98

00:17:42.000 They're savages. 0.75

00:17:44.000 They're basically, they might as well be Magellan.

00:17:47.000 Right.

00:17:48.000 Well, I mean, I was born in 66, so same basic idea.

00:17:53.000 My parents, they're too old to have been part of kind of 60s subculture, so they kind of missed that part.

00:18:02.000 But too young to kind of be 70s vibe also, so there's sort of a weird light dusting of Mad Men era on them.

00:18:12.000 And they're great people.

00:18:13.000 I love my parents.

00:18:15.000 And they did the best job that they could raising me and we're close and all that kind of stuff.

00:18:20.000 But they have a challenge trying to understand what I'm doing now.

00:18:26.000 Really?

00:18:27.000 They try, yeah, like, and they're happy that I'm happy.

00:18:30.000 But it's very, you know, they're coming from a generation where, you know, look, I grew up in a really education-focused household, and I tried my best to live up to that, and to some extent I succeeded at that, but the whole idea was premised on, you know, this myth of the American dream,

00:18:46.000 you know, study hard, get into the best school.

00:18:59.000 Yeah.

00:19:03.000 Yeah.

00:19:11.000 Because I never really intuited that.

00:19:13.000 I was just so focused on the prize.

00:19:15.000 And I'm very disciplined and determined.

00:19:18.000 But I wasn't able to step outside the box and look at it analytically in comparison to, you know, what would be best for me.

00:19:26.000 Like, I never said, what do I want?

00:19:28.000 It was just, this is what you do.

00:19:29.000 This is how you get ahead.

00:19:30.000 This is how you have a good life.

00:19:32.000 So it's not their fault.

00:19:34.000 Sure.

00:19:35.000 No, it's definitely not their fault.

00:19:36.000 The amount of information that they had available to them back then in comparison to what we have today is unbelievably different now.

00:19:44.000 There's so much more information now.

00:19:46.000 And I think there's also a very...

00:19:49.000 There's a real lack of understanding of the landscape of the race you're in.

00:19:55.000 Like everybody wants to think of it as a race, the rat race. 0.97

00:19:58.000 But if you could get an aerial view of the actual race from birth to death, from the time you're born to the time you leave this planet and look at it as like you're looking at a Formula One racetrack.

00:20:10.000 And you can actually see the chorus. 0.99

00:20:12.000 You'd be like, oh, fucking Jesus Christ, what am I doing here? 0.99

00:20:14.000 I'm wasting all my time doing shit I don't want to do. 0.99

00:20:17.000 This race is not very long. 0.99

00:20:18.000 This race is going to end.

00:20:20.000 Like, this is... 1.00

00:20:20.000 Ah, fuck. 1.00

00:20:21.000 I thought there was, like, a happiness truck somewhere along the line that I was going to refuel with. 1.00

00:20:27.000 Are you going to change my tires when I get my PhD?

00:20:29.000 It's the idea that you're going to arrive at some point or that you're going to land in this destination that is called success or happiness.

00:20:36.000 And when you get to our age, you realize that that's an illusion, right?

00:20:40.000 It just continues.

00:20:41.000 And you start to think about, you know, what your life means.

00:20:44.000 What do you stand for?

00:20:45.000 And what is your legacy?

00:20:47.000 You know, it's like we're approaching 50. It's like, you know, if I die today, what did I leave in my wake?

00:20:55.000 The bottom line is, whatever you leave, it's not going to matter.

00:20:59.000 Because it's going to matter to some people that you know, and they're going to leave too.

00:21:04.000 Everyone's going to leave.

00:21:05.000 But are you enjoying this?

00:21:07.000 Are you enjoying the moment?

00:21:08.000 Everyone's working towards this ultimate...

00:21:10.000 Like, the retirement years.

00:21:12.000 The golden years. 0.99

00:21:13.000 You're fucking almost dead when those years come. 0.99

00:21:16.000 You see those people holding hands and walking along. 1.00

00:21:20.000 They barely can walk.

00:21:21.000 Their knees hurt. 1.00

00:21:22.000 They're all fucked up. 1.00

00:21:23.000 That's not what you work for. 1.00

00:21:25.000 You don't work towards this ultimate point where you don't do anything anymore. 0.97

00:21:29.000 That's ridiculous.

00:21:30.000 What you should work towards is doing what you enjoy doing right now, enjoying your life Right now. 0.67

00:21:37.000 Enjoying your friends right now.

00:21:39.000 Enjoying whatever hobbies you like to pursue.

00:21:41.000 Whatever love affairs and friendships.

00:21:45.000 All that stuff is what life is.

00:21:47.000 Life is the moment.

00:21:49.000 Being in the moment.

00:21:50.000 And we somehow have turned it into this...

00:21:53.000 This weird, like, journey to a very specific point.

00:21:58.000 Specific points of high school graduation, college graduation, good job, marriage, children.

00:22:05.000 We have all these, like, milestones that are supposed to impart happiness in this race.

00:22:10.000 And they're not real.

00:22:12.000 They're social constructs.

00:22:13.000 And we've created these social constructs and we've fed into them and passed them down from generation to generation without anybody stepping back and going, Well, who set this up?

00:22:24.000 Who set up graduate school?

00:22:26.000 Who set up common core?

00:22:29.000 Who are these people?

00:22:31.000 Why is it this way?

00:22:34.000 We're just biological organisms trying to have as much happiness and good feeling while we're here as we can.

00:22:42.000 I feel like that's changing, though.

00:22:44.000 I think that if you talk to somebody who's in their 20s, the idea that you would work a corporate job and stay in that job for your career and collect your pension and then ride out your 60s and 70s playing golf is a foreign concept to a young person.

00:22:59.000 Whereas that was the kind of paradigm, right, for our parents' generation.

00:23:03.000 And when you look at the advent of the internet and what that provides and allows, you see this explosion in kind of lifestyle careers where you're not wed to a geographic location.

00:23:13.000 We live in a kind of subcontractor economy where people, you know, are more project-based than, you know, working for the big corporation or the plant.

00:23:23.000 And certainly all that stuff exists on some level.

00:23:26.000 But not to the extent that it used to.

00:23:28.000 And I think that's super interesting.

00:23:31.000 And I think that allows people to engage in critical thinking in a new and different way.

00:23:36.000 And I think you see young people who are asking themselves those very questions like, what do I want to do?

00:23:41.000 What makes me happy?

00:23:42.000 With that can come entitlement.

00:23:44.000 And that's why I think, you know, the millennials get a bad rap for that. 0.96

00:23:48.000 But at the same time, I think that they are...

00:23:51.000 Much more engaged in trying to grapple with who they are and what it is that they're passionate about expressing and then finding a way to tap into the economy somehow so that they can contribute and make a living doing that.

00:24:05.000 And I think that that's really cool to watch unfold.

00:24:08.000 I agree.

00:24:09.000 And I think that the idea that millennials are entitled, I think kind of every young kid has a distorted perception of the world that we live in.

00:24:19.000 And in every generation.

00:24:20.000 Well, they're probably less so today.

00:24:21.000 They're gonna be in some, probably not on a podcast, but in some form of media, you know, 20 years from now, talking about how, you know, you and I are out to lunch.

00:24:30.000 Well, we were.

00:24:31.000 I mean, that's the natural order of things.

00:24:33.000 Yeah.

00:24:33.000 But how our priorities and how we raise them, you know, is myopic in some way.

00:24:37.000 Sure.

00:24:38.000 I'm sure.

00:24:39.000 Yeah, they'll figure it out.

00:24:40.000 They'll get it better than we're doing it.

00:24:41.000 Well, with the acceleration of technology, I mean, who knows where things are going to be?

00:24:45.000 We just can't foresee what that world would look like.

00:24:48.000 Yeah, human beings might be obsolete in 20 years.

00:24:51.000 That's true.

00:24:51.000 Did you listen to the last hour of the Sam Harris podcast where you're talking about artificial intelligence?

00:24:55.000 No, I got into the first.

00:24:57.000 I think I didn't make it through the end of it.

00:24:59.000 The last hour keeps me up at night.

00:25:02.000 Did you see, there's a movie called Ex Machina.

00:25:04.000 Yeah, I'm gonna see it tonight.

00:25:05.000 So interesting.

00:25:08.000 It's haunting.

00:25:10.000 It's very well done.

00:25:11.000 It's a very small, you know, very contained independent movie, but it's so well executed and you just leave, like, with a lot to think about.

00:25:22.000 There's a lot to think about, period.

00:25:23.000 You know, I had a long sit down with Ray Kurzweil.

00:25:26.000 And I interviewed him for the sci-fi show that I did, and we went back and forth over the possibilities of this new era that we're entering into.

00:25:36.000 We went to this Global 2045 Initiative.

00:25:41.000 They were having a New York City where all the futurists got together and they were all comparing notes and talking about the different possibilities for not just artificial intelligence but symbiotic relationships with computers downloading consciousness into databases and all this kind of crazy shit and you walk away thinking like I don't I don't know if anybody knows where this is going and It's not going to stop.

00:26:07.000 There's going to be continual innovation until we reach some event horizon of science, some point of no return, you know, some what they call ultimate novelty point.

00:26:22.000 That's what Terence McKenna used to call it.

00:26:24.000 You know, this ultimate novelty point.

00:26:26.000 And it's probably going to happen within our lifetime.

00:26:29.000 It's probably going to happen within the next 20 or 30 years.

00:26:31.000 You think it's going to happen that soon?

00:26:33.000 I mean, I'm just guessing.

00:26:35.000 It's total guessing.

00:26:37.000 Well, there's always the issue of natural disasters.

00:26:39.000 Any real natural disaster would throw a massive hiccup into any plans that anyone has.

00:26:45.000 I mean, all we'd need is Yellowstone to blow, and it would set back civilization two, three generations easily, if not forever.

00:26:52.000 Well, how about just California running out of water?

00:26:54.000 You know what? 0.93

00:26:56.000 I think if we can get oil from Saudi Arabia, how the fuck can we not get water from Antarctica? 0.92

00:27:02.000 Everybody's whining about those ice caps melting. 1.00

00:27:05.000 Just stick a fucking big pipe on those bitches and run them down to the almond fields. 1.00

00:27:10.000 How hard is that? 1.00

00:27:11.000 You know what's weird is...

00:27:14.000 You would think, like, if you didn't know better, you would think, how hard can it be to desalinate the ocean?

00:27:20.000 Like, that's got to be elementary school chemistry, right?

00:27:24.000 Right.

00:27:24.000 But it's interesting that it's so difficult that, like, the best minds are having such a hard time figuring that out.

00:27:30.000 And it's almost like... 1.00

00:27:31.000 The universe has rigged it that way because human beings are such idiots that if they made it easy, our oceans would be dry deserts right now. 1.00

00:27:40.000 Because we can't help ourselves. 1.00

00:27:42.000 We cannot help ourselves.

00:27:43.000 And that is the same, you know, compulsion that is propelling technology forward and will ultimately catapult us into this AI universe that's going to destroy us.

00:27:53.000 I think whatever it is...

00:27:58.000 Why we find that funny is weird, right?

00:28:00.000 I know.

00:28:01.000 But it is true. 0.99

00:28:02.000 If we could fucking dry out the ocean... 0.98

00:28:04.000 We would have done it a long time ago. 1.00

00:28:06.000 Those houses in Malibu would be worth dog shit. 0.99

00:28:09.000 His tummy's about $20 million houses, and it's not really a $20 million house. 0.99

00:28:14.000 It's just $20 million because it's right there on the water.

00:28:16.000 Mm-hmm. 0.98

00:28:17.000 Yeah, that house would be worth fuck all, because there would be like a few hundred yards of dirt in front of your house now. 0.98

00:28:23.000 I mean, how hard can it be to separate salt from water? 0.99

00:28:26.000 Apparently it's pretty hard.

00:28:28.000 Yeah.

00:28:28.000 But you know, they just opened up a large desalination plant in San Diego.

00:28:32.000 I heard about that. 0.99

00:28:33.000 Spent over a billion dollars in this fucker and they give it a run. 1.00

00:28:36.000 Right. 1.00

00:28:36.000 I just think it's a matter of time. 1.00

00:28:38.000 I mean, it's absolutely possible to take salt out of water.

00:28:41.000 So I don't think that there's been as much incentive in the past as there is now.

00:28:46.000 And now that California has gone on this three-year drought where we need 11 trillion gallons of water just to bring us back to normal.

00:28:55.000 Mm-hmm.

00:28:57.000 Wow.

00:28:58.000 Well, it's kind of emblematic of how we deal with problems, because instead of trying to solve the problem that got us to this place, we're just looking for another source of water, right?

00:29:10.000 It's sort of like taking...

00:29:12.000 It's like taking Viagra to deal with the fact that you can't get a boner instead of looking at why it is you can't get a boner.

00:29:19.000 You know what I mean?

00:29:21.000 You're dealing with the symptom.

00:29:22.000 But there are deserts that didn't used to be deserts.

00:29:26.000 But not because of humankind.

00:29:28.000 That's because of natural forces.

00:29:30.000 Right.

00:29:30.000 So there is certainly one aspect of this that you can kind of point towards human beings, but the reality of the Earth, the absolute reality of the Earth is climates change, oceans, the levels change,

00:29:46.000 they always have, and even if people didn't exist...

00:29:50.000 You would have to deal with that.

00:29:52.000 You're starting to sound like a climate change denier.

00:29:54.000 No, no, no, but I'm definitely not.

00:29:55.000 All I'm saying is, we have this idea that once we're in a spot, we should be able to stay in this spot.

00:30:01.000 Like, this is a spot.

00:30:02.000 But there are spots in North America, first of all, like...

00:30:05.000 Half of North America was covered in a mile of ice just 10,000 years ago.

00:30:08.000 That's a fact.

00:30:09.000 And we have to deal with the fact that if we want to set up a house and we want to have five acres right here, well, guess what?

00:30:18.000 In 20 years, for whatever reason, that might not be a good spot anymore.

00:30:22.000 And we have this idea that once we own property, that that spot should be livable and ideal forever.

00:30:29.000 Even if people didn't have anything to do with the climate, the climate will shift.

00:30:34.000 Things change.

00:30:35.000 They always will change.

00:30:36.000 We just have this really rigid idea of, like, where we should be able to put cities.

00:30:41.000 I mean, when they keep finding these cities from, like, several thousand years ago, like, did you ever see those concentric circles that they found in the water that they believe represents, like, something very similar to what Atlantis was described as outside of Spain?

00:30:52.000 Outside of Spain?

00:30:54.000 They've found many, many...

00:30:56.000 Underground cities where at some point in time the sea level changed and it was long before carbon emissions long before People were burning fossil fuels and using machines.

00:31:08.000 It's just things shift.

00:31:10.000 It's not to exonerate Large corporations coal our dependence on fossil fuel. 0.97

00:31:16.000 That's it's a totally separate argument I absolutely think all you have to do is look at LA from a fucking airplane or worse I got photos of Mexico City? 1.00

00:31:25.000 Holy shit, dude. 0.99

00:31:26.000 Yeah, I was in Mexico City a couple months ago. 0.98

00:31:28.000 We go to Mexico City in June again for the UFC. By the way, nicest people.

00:31:33.000 Very, very friendly.

00:31:34.000 Like, you have this idea of Mexico City as being, like, horrible, crime-ridden, awful place.

00:31:39.000 It's not.

00:31:39.000 They're really nice people.

00:31:41.000 But, my God, their fucking pollution is insane. 1.00

00:31:45.000 You can taste it with your face. 1.00

00:31:47.000 Like, when you get out of the airplane, you're like, whoa, this is crazy.

00:31:51.000 And apparently it's better than it used to be.

00:31:53.000 Whether it's Mexico City or L.A., you get this really kind of potent sense.

00:31:59.000 You see the lights and the grid, and you realize, and the car's driving on the freeway, and you realize it's just an organism.

00:32:06.000 These freeways carrying cars are the arteries, and the cars are the blood cells.

00:32:12.000 And we're feeding these cities like they're organs in this larger unit that is interdependent.

00:32:20.000 And it's interesting.

00:32:21.000 And I think it...

00:32:23.000 You know, what you said about this idea of human beings and this idea that we think everything is static.

00:32:30.000 I mean, I think that applies across the board.

00:32:32.000 Like, we think these cities will always be there, but we also think that our lives are somewhat static or that our relationships are static or our jobs are static or our bank accounts.

00:32:41.000 All of these things, you know, we kind of agree to in this social contract, but everything is fluid, man.

00:32:47.000 It's true.

00:32:47.000 Everything is fluid and changing, you know, all the time on the micro level.

00:32:52.000 That leads to the macro.

00:32:54.000 And it's always going to be that way.

00:32:56.000 And you also have to realize, I think we have to realize that one of the... 0.98

00:32:59.000 I can't find these pictures of fucking... 0.97

00:33:01.000 I think you posted that. 0.99

00:33:03.000 Yeah, I definitely did.

00:33:04.000 It's on my Instagram.

00:33:05.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:33:06.000 But the point is that...

00:33:09.000 The only way a city got to be a city in the first place is things had to change radically.

00:33:13.000 If you looked at where that city is, you looked at Los Angeles, where it is, 400 years ago, there was absolutely nothing.

00:33:19.000 You know, there's probably some Native Americans and some Mexicans and some various people, back when it was Mexico, and they were wandering around and doing their thing, but there was no highways and sky rises and All that stuff was really, really recent.

00:33:34.000 And in terms of the actual age of the earth, my God, it's like blink your eye and then all of a sudden cities are out.

00:33:41.000 Literally a blink of an eye and then everything's polluted. 0.96

00:33:45.000 Everything's fucked and Malibu beachfront property is ridiculously overpriced. 0.74

00:33:49.000 But in the history of this planet, has there ever been more change planetarily, with the exception of natural disasters, than there has been in the last 200 years? 0.99

00:33:59.000 Well, in that sense, aren't human beings a kind of a natural disaster?

00:34:02.000 We're a virus on the planet.

00:34:04.000 I mean, come on.

00:34:05.000 That's what Hicks called us.

00:34:06.000 He called us a virus with shoes.

00:34:08.000 Yeah.

00:34:09.000 Yeah.

00:34:10.000 It's interesting.

00:34:11.000 Well, the opening of my Showtime special from like 2005, I argued that if you looked at the earth as a living organism and you're flying over and you saw LA, you'd go, well, that's cancer.

00:34:22.000 That's a growth.

00:34:23.000 It's growing.

00:34:25.000 It's out of control. 0.98

00:34:26.000 It stinks.

00:34:27.000 It looks like it's a mess and it's getting bigger. 1.00

00:34:31.000 We're greedy bastards. 0.99

00:34:32.000 We're lacking that gene that prioritizes doing things sustainably. 1.00

00:34:37.000 I think it's a huge problem.

00:34:39.000 We're predatory.

00:34:40.000 We're not symbiotic.

00:34:42.000 Well, I think we have an inescapable thirst for innovation.

00:34:47.000 We want new and better things, and we want progress.

00:34:51.000 But we're short-sighted in that regard.

00:34:53.000 We are.

00:34:53.000 We're unable to see the bigger picture.

00:34:56.000 We don't have the foresight to make the responsible decision.

00:35:01.000 Quite often.

00:35:02.000 Quite often.

00:35:03.000 Well, we err towards the side of profit and success, and oftentimes at the expense of...

00:35:13.000 What is that, you think, though?

00:35:14.000 I don't know.

00:35:15.000 I mean, other animals don't have that.

00:35:19.000 They do, though.

00:35:21.000 They do.

00:35:21.000 Beavers fuck up dams and they create dams and ruin rivers.

00:35:25.000 But they don't make beaver cities. 0.92

00:35:27.000 Because they can.

00:35:28.000 If they could, they would.

00:35:29.000 They could get together and, you know, make one huge giant dam in the Mississippi River.

00:35:34.000 If they could agree with each other, they would probably do it. 0.99

00:35:37.000 They don't give a fuck about you. 1.00

00:35:39.000 Bears just shit wherever they walk. 1.00

00:35:41.000 They don't clean up. 1.00

00:35:42.000 They don't have a certain spot where they put all their shit. 0.99

00:35:44.000 They just don't have enough of an impact to really change the environment around them. 0.99

00:35:49.000 But if they could, they would.

00:35:50.000 I was listening to a Radiolab podcast about the Galapagos Islands, and it's very fascinating because they had to eradicate goats Because these sailors had brought goats over, you know, way back in the day.

00:36:03.000 And they had brought goats and they'd put them on the island so that they could come back and eat them, like they would have a food source.

00:36:10.000 But these goats just destroy everything in their path. 0.97

00:36:15.000 They just killed everything and they fucked it all up for the tortoises. 1.00

00:36:19.000 These poor tortoises were fucked. 1.00

00:36:21.000 They didn't have any plant matter anymore. 1.00

00:36:23.000 Because all these goats were coming along.

00:36:24.000 So then they hired these people to kill the goats.

00:36:27.000 So they flew over in helicopters and they gunned down the goats.

00:36:30.000 And then goats started getting smart.

00:36:32.000 So what they'd do was they would find goats.

00:36:35.000 They would capture them.

00:36:36.000 They would put radio collars on them.

00:36:38.000 They would scare them.

00:36:39.000 They would run over to where the other goats were. 0.80

00:36:41.000 And then they would find where the goats were.

00:36:42.000 They would kill all of them except the ones with the radio collars.

00:36:45.000 And so they became what they called Judas goats. 0.88

00:36:47.000 It's really fascinating how they set this up.

00:36:50.000 And then it got to a point where it was nothing but Judas goats. 0.58

00:36:54.000 That's all that was left.

00:36:55.000 And so then, you know, they tried to reintroduce tortoises.

00:37:00.000 It's really fascinating.

00:37:01.000 But the argument could be made that any animal acting purely in its own interest will ultimately fuck up everything around it.

00:37:09.000 And that's one of the reasons why there's got to be some kind of a balance.

00:37:13.000 There's got to be some kind of a balance between humans and the plants that we coexist with and the animals that we coexist with.

00:37:21.000 And the same can be said with animals.

00:37:22.000 Like, you know, you can't have too many predators in an area.

00:37:25.000 You can't have too many You know, too many deer in an area.

00:37:29.000 You run into them with cars.

00:37:31.000 They start starving to death.

00:37:32.000 You get ticks and people start spreading.

00:37:34.000 They start spreading Lyme disease.

00:37:36.000 There's like humans and animals and they all act in their own interest.

00:37:41.000 It's just we're the only ones that have fingers. 0.97

00:37:44.000 We can manipulate shit and change the environment in ways that no other animal can even come close to. 0.96

00:37:49.000 There is an infinitely complex play that's going on, and we insert ourselves into that, and we have this reductionist idea. 0.99

00:37:58.000 Oh, if we insert this one thing, then that will fix the problem.

00:38:01.000 And what we don't do is really understand that The extent to which the interdependency of everything else comes into play.

00:38:10.000 And I think that's true whether you're introducing an animal to an ecology to solve a problem and it creates a bigger problem or whether you're, you know, taking a drug to resolve one condition that has side effects or whether you're overly focused on one micronutrient or macronutrient as the solution to your health problem.

00:38:29.000 You know, everything is more complicated than that.

00:38:32.000 And, you know, I don't think that we...

00:38:34.000 Kind of embrace a more holistic approach to, you know, whether it's our problems or our health or what have you.

00:38:41.000 That's another thing that's like not part of our wiring and it's not part of the, you know, the scientific method is by definition reductionist because you have to isolate variables and look at one thing at a time.

00:38:53.000 It's true.

00:38:53.000 Yeah, that's very true.

00:38:54.000 That's very true.

00:38:55.000 Science in and of itself is reductionist.

00:38:57.000 And I think that there's also this weird hope that people have that if we fuck something up, then our backs get against the wall, then someone really smart will invent a solution and it'll all be better.

00:39:09.000 That someone right now is analyzing the Who knows how many fucking trillions of pounds of plastic we've dumped in the ocean?

00:39:17.000 And they're trying to figure out some way to suck all that stuff out and turn it into some sort of a fuel or some resource that we can capitalize on. 0.72

00:39:28.000 That kind of thinking is real common.

00:39:32.000 We always think that eventually someone smarter will figure out a way out of this mess.

00:39:36.000 Yeah, Elon Musk is going to solve it for all of us, right?

00:39:39.000 And I think that...

00:39:41.000 He might.

00:39:41.000 I think that part of that is just the level of disenfranchisement that the average person has.

00:39:46.000 Like, we just don't feel like our vote counts.

00:39:48.000 We don't feel like our dollar counts. 1.00

00:39:50.000 And like, fuck it. 1.00

00:39:51.000 You know, Dancing with the Stars is on. 1.00

00:39:53.000 And like, I can't make a difference. 0.80

00:39:54.000 So, you know, I'm going to throw my garbage out the window.

00:39:57.000 And who cares?

00:39:58.000 I just found out that Dancing with the Stars has been on for 10 years.

00:40:01.000 Has it?

00:40:02.000 I've never watched a single episode.

00:40:03.000 I really have never. 0.99

00:40:05.000 I've been flipping through the channels and I saw some people dancing and everybody cheering and I was like, what in the actual fuck? 0.99

00:40:10.000 And then I changed the channel again. 0.99

00:40:11.000 Like, we're watching people dance now?

00:40:13.000 Really?

00:40:14.000 Like, nobody likes to dance like that.

00:40:16.000 That was like, isn't that what, like, Mexican TV was?

00:40:21.000 Dancing with the Stars?

00:40:22.000 No, but like, you know, you turn on like, when we were kids, it was like, it was all song and dance, you know, on the Spanish television shows, Spanish networks.

00:40:29.000 I thought it was all those crazy soap operas.

00:40:31.000 Yeah, that too.

00:40:33.000 But that's what reality TV is, sort of, right?

00:40:36.000 We've regressed.

00:40:37.000 In some ways.

00:40:39.000 Well, there's a part of us that really, we really love base things.

00:40:43.000 You know, we love emotions.

00:40:45.000 Like, I was just thinking of this the other day.

00:40:47.000 The talk show host, like a Morton Downey Jr. or a Jenny Jones or a Geraldo Rivera, any of those shows, or like...

00:41:00.000 Montel Williams, where they would have guests, and then they would go to the audience, and the audience would say something that would get everybody to go, Oh!

00:41:09.000 Like, that...

00:41:12.000 That thing that they created, those are like the original YouTube commenters.

00:41:16.000 Those are like the original social media commenters.

00:41:20.000 The people that are in the audience, they don't have anything to do with what's on them, but they get to interject and say something, and then that becomes a part of the entertainment.

00:41:28.000 But it's really just, you know, it's this weird social interaction between human beings and us, like, sitting as sidelines.

00:41:36.000 What are you showing?

00:41:37.000 Sure.

00:41:38.000 Oh, yeah.

00:41:39.000 Of course.

00:41:40.000 Jerry Springer.

00:41:41.000 He's the master of that.

00:41:43.000 What a crazy way to make a living, right?

00:41:45.000 I know.

00:41:45.000 Well, that guy was a character.

00:41:47.000 Yeah.

00:41:47.000 He's still alive, right?

00:41:49.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:41:50.000 He's actually a very intelligent guy.

00:41:52.000 He is.

00:41:52.000 Wasn't he mayor of Cleveland or something like that?

00:41:54.000 Mm-hmm.

00:41:55.000 Yeah.

00:41:55.000 And he got...

00:41:57.000 In trouble, some prostitution.

00:41:59.000 Cincinnati?

00:41:59.000 I think there was a little cocaine problem at one point.

00:42:01.000 A little bit of that.

00:42:02.000 A little bit of blow. 1.00

00:42:04.000 But, you know, we enjoy those stupid moments that don't mean anything. 1.00

00:42:10.000 You know, where someone says something and everybody goes, Oh! 0.99

00:42:14.000 There's nothing wrong with a guilty pleasure, though.

00:42:17.000 You know what I mean?

00:42:18.000 No, not necessarily.

00:42:19.000 Look, you can't fix the world.

00:42:21.000 You can't be Captain Save-A-Ho and go out there and fix the whole world and go to the Jerry Springle crowd and start hanging out kale leaves and, you know, pamphlets for yoga classes.

00:42:30.000 It's not going to work.

00:42:31.000 Are you talking about me, Joe?

00:42:32.000 I'm talking about everybody.

00:42:33.000 Look, I eat kale, too, dude.

00:42:35.000 I know you do.

00:42:36.000 That's a thing, man.

00:42:37.000 If you've ever mocked, like, very... 0.95

00:42:43.000 Just ridiculous proselytizing vegans, which I have. 0.86

00:42:47.000 People think all of a sudden I don't like vegans. 0.92

00:42:50.000 They think I don't like them or I don't eat that food.

00:42:53.000 I eat that food almost always.

00:42:55.000 I eat more vegetables than I eat meat.

00:42:58.000 I eat way more vegetables.

00:42:59.000 I eat a lot of it.

00:43:00.000 I think it's good for you.

00:43:01.000 Well, vegans are an easy target. 1.00

00:43:02.000 You guys are easy as fuck. 1.00

00:43:04.000 You know what I mean? 1.00

00:43:05.000 But you're not.

00:43:07.000 You're like...

00:43:09.000 If all vegans were like you, there would be no target.

00:43:12.000 It's like people who just eat healthy.

00:43:15.000 That's it.

00:43:15.000 You're just someone who enjoys eating plants instead of animal products, and that's just your diet.

00:43:22.000 It doesn't become a fucking religion with you. 0.96

00:43:24.000 No, I mean, look, you know, first of all, it's not my place to pass judgment on anybody else and their behavior patterns and their habits. 0.99

00:43:33.000 And, you know, I'm not...

00:43:35.000 I'm not trying to, you know, recruit people to my lifestyle.

00:43:39.000 You know, if people want to ask me about it, I'm happy to talk about it.

00:43:43.000 But I'm not, like, yelling from a bully pulpit, you know, shaming people.

00:43:48.000 The shaming people is a problem, right?

00:43:50.000 I have no, you know...

00:43:53.000 There's no air of moral superiority about it whatsoever.

00:43:57.000 It's a lifestyle that I choose, but I don't think that that gives me, you know, permission to levy judgment on any other human being and their choices.

00:44:10.000 So, you know, the way that I try to communicate the message is just to, you know, live my life and, you know, I sort of stand where I'm standing, and if people are interested, they'll come to me and I can communicate to them.

00:44:25.000 But it's not a proselytizing point of view that I adopt. 0.99

00:44:31.000 I think some people adopt certain behaviors just because it gives them license to be an asshole. 1.00

00:44:36.000 I really do. 0.99

00:44:37.000 I mean there are certain vegans that think that because they are vegans they can go out and attack and be really shitty to other people and somehow or another they're acting in a positive way and they're gonna enact some positive change by being really shitty to people.

00:44:56.000 It's like this idea of a social justice warrior falls into the same category by being really mean to people that you think Think the wrong way or behave the wrong way, that somehow or another you're going to shame them into changing by being really aggressive and offensive to them?

00:45:13.000 I mean, shaming somebody is not an effective way of trying to getting them to change.

00:45:17.000 It's one of the least effective ways.

00:45:18.000 I mean, look, people change when they're ready to change.

00:45:21.000 It's really an internal willingness that drives change.

00:45:25.000 And somebody's either ready to make a change or they're not, and different people receive messages in different ways.

00:45:30.000 So if you look at...

00:45:32.000 Look, if you look at the vegan movement, because that's what we're talking about, you know, there are super hardcore animal rights activists, and they have a certain way of communicating, and there's a certain population of people that are receptive to that kind of communication.

00:45:45.000 There are other people that are interested in environmental issues.

00:45:48.000 They want to be better environmentalists.

00:45:50.000 And so there are people that speak to the vegan movement from that perspective.

00:45:55.000 And there's a certain audience that's receptive to that.

00:45:58.000 And the way that I communicate it or carry the message is in a different way.

00:46:03.000 And there's different people that are attracted to that.

00:46:05.000 So I think whatever your point of view is or whatever movement you're part of, and we can get into the whole idea of how we're wired to be on teams and how counterproductive that is.

00:46:17.000 You know, there's enough people out there that are, you know, there's a diversity of voices and a diversity of audiences that every kind of voice carries a frequency that other people respond to,

00:46:35.000 I guess.

00:46:35.000 I didn't say that very articulately.

00:46:37.000 I know what you're saying, though.

00:46:38.000 You know, there are definitely going to be...

00:46:40.000 There's no one that responds well to being insulted, though.

00:46:43.000 No one. 0.55

00:46:44.000 I mean, if you're really trying to convey a message, being really shitty about it is the last thing.

00:46:48.000 Well, look at political talk shows on Saturday and Sunday morning, and they're just shouting at each other.

00:46:53.000 And basically, they're just rallying support from their base, each side.

00:46:57.000 They're trying to win, right?

00:46:58.000 But they're not converting people from one side to the other.

00:47:02.000 No one ever gets converted.

00:47:03.000 So...

00:47:04.000 The only way anybody ever gets converted is if you can say something very thoughtful that penetrates past this wall of ideology they have in their head.

00:47:14.000 And they go, hmm, and then they have to consider it.

00:47:17.000 But they're not going to consider it if you're insulting.

00:47:19.000 They're just not.

00:47:19.000 It's going to be a contest.

00:47:21.000 It's going to be a you versus them. 0.97

00:47:22.000 You say something rude to them.

00:47:24.000 They're going to try to say something ruder to you.

00:47:26.000 And you're playing ping pong.

00:47:29.000 Ping pong pong.

00:47:30.000 You're just ping-pong with insults.

00:47:31.000 And to be clear, like, you know, I'm a member of this community, and, you know, a proud member, I would say.

00:47:38.000 Are you a card-carrying member?

00:47:39.000 I think I have the card in my wallet.

00:47:42.000 Is it a leaf?

00:47:43.000 It is a leaf.

00:47:44.000 It's in that juicy lady's glass over there.

00:47:47.000 We don't have cards.

00:47:48.000 We just carry a sphere.

00:47:49.000 I think, you know, my theory on it, the people that are kind of, you would characterize as, you know, vociferous and angry and judgmental, my theory is that, There's a certain percentage of the population that come out of the womb...

00:48:04.000 Broken?

00:48:05.000 Well, there's that.

00:48:06.000 Okay, so there's that.

00:48:07.000 Of course.

00:48:08.000 You know, there are those people, for sure.

00:48:10.000 And there are other people that I think are wired to be super sensitive.

00:48:14.000 Sure.

00:48:15.000 And from a very early age, they just find the idea of, you know, an animal dying for food to be the most intolerable concept they can imagine.

00:48:24.000 Right?

00:48:25.000 And they're just...

00:48:25.000 That's how they came into the world.

00:48:27.000 Right?

00:48:28.000 And so...

00:48:30.000 And so they kind of, you know, grow older and they navigate the world and they start, you know, becoming sort of more outspoken about this idea.

00:48:38.000 And when people are not receptive to it, or they're not seeing the world the way that they're seeing it, they become progressively more frustrated.

00:48:45.000 And that frustration turns to resentment.

00:48:48.000 That resentment can morph into anger.

00:48:50.000 And then, you know, you have what you see, which is people who are, they're just incensed that other people are not seeing the world the way that they're seeing it.

00:48:59.000 And I think that applies, you know, to any contingent of the population that holds a very strong point of view.

00:49:06.000 I agree with you.

00:49:07.000 I think that there's definitely going to be certain people that are hardwired for sensitivity.

00:49:12.000 There's just no getting around it.

00:49:14.000 And you realize that when you have children.

00:49:16.000 You know, I have two young daughters that are so different.

00:49:20.000 They're only two years apart from each other.

00:49:21.000 Grew up in the same household.

00:49:23.000 They could not be more different.

00:49:24.000 It's just right out of the box.

00:49:26.000 They're just different people.

00:49:27.000 Yeah, and you realize, like, You had nothing to do with that.

00:49:31.000 Yeah, I mean you have a little bit to do with how they you know how they process things and how they deal with things based on learned.

00:49:38.000 But that innate core kind of perspective and whatever they're naturally inclined to is just you can see it at such a young age.

00:49:47.000 Yeah, that's the difference, right?

00:49:48.000 The difference is like what what is just a real part of them?

00:49:54.000 What is a real part of them?

00:49:56.000 Like, what is just inescapable?

00:50:00.000 Like, they have certain ingredients.

00:50:02.000 Like, a car is made out of aluminum and rubber and metal.

00:50:05.000 Like, there's certain ingredients that certain people have when they're born.

00:50:09.000 And also, inclinations.

00:50:11.000 Inclinations towards certain activities, like we were talking about before.

00:50:15.000 Like, trying to find things that make your children happy.

00:50:18.000 Trying to encourage things that make your children happy.

00:50:20.000 To find a thing that jives with their ingredients.

00:50:25.000 Mm-hmm.

00:50:26.000 You know, and some people, they look at animals and they just have this inescapable kinship.

00:50:33.000 And some of that kinship is ridiculous to the point where you ever read those Tumblr blogs where people think that they should have been born a fox?

00:50:39.000 No, I haven't seen that.

00:50:41.000 Foxkin? 0.92

00:50:41.000 You've never seen that? 0.92

00:50:42.000 That sounds like something Red Band would spend a lot of time doing.

00:50:45.000 Thinking you used to be a fox?

00:50:47.000 No, just being on weird Tumblr sites.

00:50:50.000 Weird Tumblr sites can get very addictive.

00:50:52.000 You wonder whether or not you're being trolled.

00:50:54.000 Some of them are so weird, you wonder, like, okay, is this real?

00:50:59.000 You know?

00:51:00.000 Yeah, I don't know.

00:51:01.000 Foxkin.

00:51:02.000 You never heard of that?

00:51:02.000 No, I haven't.

00:51:03.000 People, they believe that they should have been born as foxes.

00:51:08.000 Yes.

00:51:09.000 They believe they're a fox can.

00:51:10.000 That's their spirit animal.

00:51:11.000 You're an open-minded thinker.

00:51:13.000 There's other dimensions at play.

00:51:15.000 You saw Interstellar.

00:51:16.000 I didn't see Interstellar, unfortunately.

00:51:18.000 Oh, you didn't?

00:51:18.000 No, I haven't seen it yet.

00:51:19.000 I'm just fucking busy, bro.

00:51:21.000 But the idea is just... 0.99

00:51:25.000 That's a ridiculous idea.

00:51:26.000 But I also think that there's also people that have this very idealistic idea of animals and nature itself. 0.93

00:51:32.000 There's some videos we've been shown recently with deer that are eating birds, eating birds alive, which apparently is a recent discovery.

00:51:42.000 That deer are not really just herbivores.

00:51:45.000 They're herbivores by convenience.

00:51:47.000 But when they find birds on the ground, they eat them.

00:51:50.000 They seek them out.

00:51:50.000 They actually chase them.

00:51:51.000 Is that a result of encroaching habitat by urban centers?

00:51:57.000 No.

00:51:57.000 No, these are wild deer in very rural areas.

00:52:01.000 They've been observed, too.

00:52:03.000 Apparently they get minerals and stuff from deer, from birds rather.

00:52:08.000 And they're more inclined to do so when they're growing their antlers.

00:52:11.000 They feel more drawn to eating birds.

00:52:17.000 That's interesting.

00:52:17.000 I didn't know that.

00:52:18.000 Yeah, there's a bunch of videos.

00:52:19.000 It's kind of disturbing.

00:52:20.000 Because, you know, even though I'm a hunter and I eat deer...

00:52:25.000 I think they're beautiful.

00:52:26.000 And I always think of them as being these peaceful things. 0.99

00:52:29.000 And we see them chasing a bird and just chewing it alive and this fucking thing is kicking inside their mouth and trying to get away. 0.99

00:52:37.000 Well, they're just, they're part of the, you know, natural cycle of life. 0.99

00:52:42.000 They're just trying to survive like everything else.

00:52:44.000 Yes.

00:52:46.000 I think to the casual observer or somebody who's listening to this podcast, they may think that there's this giant gap between the way that you live and the way that I live.

00:52:57.000 And I think there's actually a bigger gap between the way that I live and the normal human being than yourself because of...

00:53:03.000 Look, you're a hunter.

00:53:05.000 I don't hunt.

00:53:05.000 It's not something that I'm interested in doing.

00:53:07.000 But you have a connection to where your food is coming from that is very close and primal.

00:53:14.000 And in the grand scheme of things, more sustainable than the way that the average typical American is.

00:53:22.000 It's kind of more sustainable, but honestly, not for everybody.

00:53:27.000 The reality of why...

00:53:28.000 Well, not everybody could do it.

00:53:29.000 Yeah.

00:53:30.000 You know, not everybody could do it.

00:53:31.000 I mean, I think that right now, our food system is broken.

00:53:37.000 You know, our system of factory farming is unsustainable.

00:53:41.000 I actually brought you this documentary...

00:53:43.000 It's called Cowspiracy.

00:53:46.000 Cowspiracy?

00:53:47.000 Oh, Cowspiracy.

00:53:48.000 I was involved in producing this movie.

00:53:51.000 You should check it out.

00:53:52.000 But basically, it's a look at the impact of animal agriculture on our environment.

00:53:59.000 It's horrible.

00:54:00.000 It's pretty interesting.

00:54:01.000 Did you see that video that they got, a drone video of these gigantic pig farms? 1.00

00:54:09.000 And just the fucking... 1.00

00:54:12.000 Unbelievable environmental catastrophe these things create where they have lakes of piss and shit from these pigs. 1.00

00:54:20.000 It's abhorrent. 1.00

00:54:21.000 Have you seen it?

00:54:22.000 No, I haven't.

00:54:22.000 I can only imagine.

00:54:23.000 You really should see it.

00:54:24.000 See if you could pull that video up, Jamie, because it's insane to look at.

00:54:28.000 When you stop and think about the amount of Smithfield Foods factory farms, that's it right there.

00:54:35.000 This guy flies this drone, which is pretty fucking cool that they have these drones now that you could do this and get this A high-resolution video.

00:54:43.000 That's interesting.

00:54:44.000 Well, if you're dealing with a place like Los Angeles, 20 million people, 20 million people and 95% of them eat meat.

00:54:51.000 You're dealing with an insane amount of flesh that needs to be consumed on a daily basis.

00:54:57.000 And it has to be grown somewhere and shipped somewhere.

00:54:59.000 And conveniently, we want to...

00:55:01.000 Sort of ignore it. 1.00

00:55:02.000 That is a lake of shit and piss. 1.00

00:55:05.000 And it's all coming from these factories right there in front of you. 1.00

00:55:10.000 Those are housing units for pigs. 0.83

00:55:13.000 They're stuffed into these things, crammed next to each other, and they stand on these metal grates. 0.99

00:55:19.000 So the metal grates are porous, they piss and shit, it goes through the holes, and it all goes through these tubes that lead down into that giant lake. 0.88

00:55:28.000 Apparently the smell, if you're anywhere near there, is so bad, you literally feel like you could probably light the air on fire.

00:55:36.000 I'm sure Smithfield is not too excited about this video being out there.

00:55:40.000 And there's all these ag-gag laws right now that prevent consumers from filming this kind of thing.

00:55:45.000 Isn't that insane?

00:55:46.000 It's interesting that he's been able to do this with a drone.

00:55:48.000 And whether you eat bacon for breakfast every morning or you eat more like me, I think we can all agree that...

00:55:56.000 That transparency is important.

00:55:58.000 And these companies are not transparent about how they produce their food.

00:56:01.000 And there's a lot of problems with it.

00:56:03.000 And the waste that it creates and the amount of resources and, you know, what goes into this process is something that I think we could all benefit from taking a harder look at.

00:56:14.000 You know what would be interesting is if you go to the...

00:56:17.000 We're good to go.

00:56:36.000 The elephant in the room, when we talk about global climate change or greenhouse gas emissions, we talk about fossil fuel use, we talk about fracking, and rightly so.

00:56:47.000 These are important things to talk about.

00:56:49.000 But really, the thing that we're not talking enough about is the impact of our food system on all of these systems.

00:56:56.000 And when you look at, for example, water use, we're talking about water, right?

00:57:01.000 You know, there's PSAs in California.

00:57:02.000 We're not supposed to take long showers.

00:57:04.000 We can't water our lawns, all these sorts of things.

00:57:06.000 And the truth is, is that consumer water use in California is like 5%.

00:57:11.000 And animal agriculture accounts for like 55% of all water use.

00:57:16.000 And you know what a big one is?

00:57:17.000 You know what the really big useless one is?

00:57:19.000 Well, golf courses.

00:57:20.000 Golf courses.

00:57:21.000 Well, animal agriculture trumps golf courses.

00:57:24.000 Right, but at least animal agriculture is like feeding animals that people eat. 1.00

00:57:27.000 You're just feeding fucking white dudes rolling balls around the grass. 1.00

00:57:32.000 That's an insane amount of water. 1.00

00:57:34.000 For your amusement, right?

00:57:35.000 Yeah.

00:57:36.000 I think it takes something like 660 gallons of water to produce a hamburger.

00:57:43.000 And like a thousand gallons of milk, or a thousand gallons of water to produce one gallon of milk, something like that.

00:57:49.000 Like the statistics are completely insane.

00:57:51.000 And that, because a lot of it is the water that's used to grow the grain that you're feeding to these animals.

00:57:56.000 So when you look at it systemically, you know, it's just... 0.97

00:58:00.000 If you were an alien who beamed down to planet Earth and said, take me to your leader and show me how you make your food, he would just be like, you guys are crazy. 0.98

00:58:09.000 You're killing the planet to do this. 0.99

00:58:11.000 It doesn't make sense.

00:58:13.000 It's not sustainable in the long term.

00:58:16.000 If we did it exactly the way we're doing it right now forever, would that be sustainable?

00:58:21.000 I don't think so.

00:58:22.000 We can do it right now.

00:58:23.000 Well, I mean, the way that we're doing it right now, I mean, we're destroying rainforests like crazy, right?

00:58:29.000 It's like one to two acres every hour or something like that.

00:58:32.000 But isn't that a lot of it is due to they're getting exotic hardwoods and all these different...

00:58:37.000 It's all lumbering and...

00:58:38.000 There's some of that for sure.

00:58:40.000 And there's palm oil and there's other things like that.

00:58:42.000 But I think the gravamen, the majority of it goes to grazing land and growing crops for livestock.

00:58:49.000 This is other countries.

00:58:50.000 This is not America.

00:58:51.000 Yeah, like the Amazonian rainforest.

00:58:53.000 Yeah, we're not cutting down the rainforest in America, and we're not getting our beef from there either.

00:58:57.000 But I think, you know, like an insane amount of our total land mass is devoted to animal agriculture too.

00:59:04.000 So, you know, it's like billions of these animals that we're specifically raising to eat, you know, and it's a huge problem.

00:59:17.000 It is a huge problem that is something that is outside of your normal thinking.

00:59:22.000 Your normal everyday thinking, you're getting on the highway, goddammit, there's traffic today.

00:59:26.000 You're getting to work, oh great, we've got this new project we have to deal with. 0.99

00:59:30.000 And your real existence, like all that stuff is bullshit if you don't have any food. 1.00

00:59:35.000 All that traffic, all the work stuff, like hey, you're gonna die. 1.00

00:59:39.000 You don't have any food.

00:59:41.000 Like, this is, like, here's a bunch of things that you need to have in place before you think about any other hobbies or projects or whatever you're trying to accomplish with your career.

00:59:52.000 You gotta have a place where you can breathe the air, okay?

00:59:55.000 The air has to be clean.

00:59:57.000 That's one.

00:59:57.000 Well, the ocean has to be hospitable for, you know, for fish and plant life, right?

01:00:03.000 Yes.

01:00:03.000 Well, if you're a vegan, you really don't need to worry about anything other than the plant life in the ocean.

01:00:07.000 If you're only eating kelp, But actually, kelp is a very good source of protein, right?

01:00:10.000 That goes back to this reductionist idea, right?

01:00:13.000 These are complex ecosystems.

01:00:14.000 So you knock one thing out in the ocean and the domino effect of that.

01:00:18.000 You know, like the runoff that's caused from, you know, waste.

01:00:23.000 Animal agriculture is a big one.

01:00:24.000 There's all kinds of waste that pours into the ocean.

01:00:27.000 But just sewage.

01:00:27.000 And it creates these massive dead zones, the algal blooms, right?

01:00:31.000 That deprives them, like thousands of acres worth across the ocean that are so oxygen deprived that nothing can live in them.

01:00:40.000 Well, there was a big die-off when I was in Hermosa Beach a couple of years ago. 0.97

01:00:45.000 They had a giant fish die off where it was, oh, so fucking stinky. 0.99

01:00:49.000 It was so nasty. 0.99

01:00:50.000 And they'd wash up on the shore.

01:00:51.000 Well, I think they just died, like, in certain bays.

01:00:54.000 You know, there was an area where they just hit a dead zone and a bunch of fish died.

01:00:59.000 And super normal, very common, happens all the time.

01:01:03.000 And it smelled so bad. 0.99

01:01:05.000 It was just, you know, probably a fucking million dead fish or something. 0.99

01:01:08.000 Wow. 0.99

01:01:09.000 Yeah.

01:01:09.000 Awful.

01:01:10.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:01:11.000 But we're so...

01:01:12.000 What we're getting at.

01:01:12.000 But, I mean, yeah, I mean, as typical consumers, we're divorced from that.

01:01:19.000 That's not in our face.

01:01:20.000 You know what I mean?

01:01:20.000 Like, we're not really...

01:01:21.000 We don't have to, like, reckon with that on a daily basis.

01:01:24.000 Is it possible that, like, could you have an entire city of 20 million people...

01:01:29.000 You couldn't have an entire city of 20 million people that lived as hunters.

01:01:32.000 You really couldn't.

01:01:34.000 You would need more animals.

01:01:35.000 But could you have an entire city of 20 million people that were vegan?

01:01:39.000 Oh, yeah.

01:01:39.000 I mean, I think that the amount of land that you need to grow food for vegans is like, you know, I don't know, a fraction, a tiny fraction of the amount of land that is required to raise animals for food.

01:01:51.000 Because the animals have to eat a lot of food in order to get to a size that you can cook them in.

01:02:00.000 Go to Cowspiracy.com, and there's a section called Facts, and they kind of break it all down.

01:02:04.000 It's kind of interesting to look at.

01:02:06.000 But yeah, I mean, I think that the amount of land...

01:02:09.000 Like, we're producing enough food to feed the planet, really.

01:02:13.000 It's really like an allocation and distribution issue, as much as anything.

01:02:17.000 You mean we, like America?

01:02:18.000 Is that what you're saying?

01:02:18.000 Most of the food that we're growing in the breadbasket of America is going to livestock.

01:02:23.000 Right.

01:02:23.000 It's not going to human beings.

01:02:24.000 You mean like the cornfields?

01:02:26.000 Yeah.

01:02:26.000 They're also making that corn that's really not even edible for humans.

01:02:30.000 Did you see, you saw King Corn?

01:02:32.000 Yeah, I did.

01:02:33.000 Amazing.

01:02:34.000 Amazing documentary.

01:02:35.000 We're all like made out of corn. 0.97

01:02:36.000 It was fucking crazy when they do the tests on their body and they find out that the carbon... 0.99

01:02:42.000 More corn than human. 0.99

01:02:43.000 The carbon in their body is coming from corn.

01:02:46.000 And you find out how many different things at the supermarket, when they went through the supermarket, they looked at all the different things that have corn syrup in it, corn starch, corn this, corn that.

01:02:55.000 It's like, wow.

01:02:57.000 Right.

01:02:57.000 How did that happen?

01:02:58.000 How did they hijack the entire food system?

01:03:02.000 It's quite amazing. 1.00

01:03:03.000 You don't need fucking corn. 0.99

01:03:06.000 All that stuff that they're using corn for is not really necessary. 0.99

01:03:10.000 But you can profit off of it if you own the corn.

01:03:14.000 And if you have some sort of a relationship with the government, you can get...

01:03:21.000 Subsidies, and that's what happens.

01:03:23.000 They're being fed off subsidies.

01:03:24.000 That's one of the things that was most disturbing about it. 1.00

01:03:26.000 Like, wait a minute, this is so destructive, and you guys couldn't even afford to grow this shit if it wasn't for the government? 0.99

01:03:34.000 If the government didn't pay corn farmers, if they didn't have government subsidies, a lot of them would just go under. 0.99

01:03:41.000 Yeah.

01:03:41.000 I mean, I think that we're entrenched in this system that is dependent upon these subsidies, right?

01:03:47.000 And so much of our economy, you know, functions in this way.

01:03:50.000 And I think if we really want to change our food system, we have to eradicate these subsidies.

01:03:56.000 You know, look, there's a reason why, I think we talked about this last time, I can't remember.

01:04:00.000 There's a reason why, like, you know, a Taco Bell taco is like whatever it is, like 89 cents or whatever, and it's like, it's the same price it was when we were 12. You know, it's like, how does that work?

01:04:11.000 You know?

01:04:12.000 A McDonald's cheeseburger is like two bucks or whatever it is, but if you factor in, like if you look at it from a meta perspective, and you take into account all the subsidies, You know, a Big Mac would actually cost something like $7.50 or,

01:04:27.000 you know, it'd be like a multiple on its price.

01:04:30.000 There's a book called Metanomics by this guy called David Simon, where he, I'm sorry, Metanomics, and he really breaks down how these subsidies work and how that kind of fuels this food system that really is creating, you know, it's sort of It's making the lower socioeconomic class less and less healthy,

01:04:52.000 because it's creating this wider gap between healthy living and unhealthy living.

01:04:57.000 Because in food deserts, in urban food deserts, where there is no farmer's market, but there's McDonald's and Jack in the Box on every corner, And, you know, you're on welfare and you got three kids.

01:05:08.000 Like, what are you gonna do?

01:05:09.000 Right? 0.99

01:05:09.000 You're gonna eat the shitty food. 0.99

01:05:11.000 This is too cheap to not. 0.99

01:05:13.000 That's a really good point.

01:05:14.000 That's a really good point as far as the amount that it costs for these things and the fact that it's because of subsidies.

01:05:21.000 And as a result of that, we're in this place right now where suddenly health and wellness have become elitist ideals, synonymous with spending a ton of money at Whole Foods.

01:05:32.000 And that's crazy.

01:05:34.000 Are you opposed to eating chicken eggs from someone who grows chickens and has them free-ranging?

01:05:42.000 I have chickens that...

01:05:45.000 They lay eggs every day, and they're essentially my pets.

01:05:49.000 I eat my pets' food.

01:05:51.000 I feed them.

01:05:53.000 They eat some table scraps, but a lot of them, they eat just free-range.

01:05:59.000 They run around eating stuff in the grass and eating bugs.

01:06:04.000 From an ethical point of view?

01:06:05.000 Yeah.

01:06:06.000 If you're raising your own chickens, and they're like your pets, and they're laying eggs that are not going to be turned into chickens, then I think ethically, I don't really see a problem with that.

01:06:19.000 You know what I mean?

01:06:20.000 Those eggs are not going to turn into chickens.

01:06:25.000 But PETA has this thing on their website about eggs being chicken periods, and they're trying to discourage people from eating eggs.

01:06:32.000 Have you ever seen it?

01:06:34.000 It's hilarious.

01:06:36.000 It's one of those things where it just shows you, like, there's...

01:06:41.000 There's ethical considerations when it comes to livestock and animals that are...

01:06:45.000 They're rational.

01:06:47.000 They make sense.

01:06:48.000 And then you get into this extreme animal rights ideology where they're trying to twist reality.

01:06:54.000 And so they have a bloody pair of underwear and a chicken.

01:06:59.000 Here it is.

01:06:59.000 Look at this.

01:07:00.000 Eggs come from chicken menstruation.

01:07:02.000 So they're frying a bloody pair of underwear...

01:07:05.000 In a frying pan.

01:07:07.000 Don't eat eggs.

01:07:08.000 Period.

01:07:09.000 And the word period is red.

01:07:12.000 Like, period blood.

01:07:14.000 I mean, this is the reason why people...

01:07:15.000 I will say this about PETA. They're very effective at marketing.

01:07:17.000 It's not effective.

01:07:18.000 Well, we're talking about it right now. 0.99

01:07:20.000 We're talking about how retarded they are. 1.00

01:07:22.000 I eat seven more eggs today just because of these assholes. 1.00

01:07:25.000 That's not effective. 1.00

01:07:27.000 That's ridiculous. 0.81

01:07:28.000 I think that if you have chickens at your home, and they're your pets, and your kids play with them, and they're laying eggs that are not going to turn into chickens, and you decide that you want to eat those eggs from a morality point of view, I don't really see how I could have a big problem with that. 0.93

01:07:45.000 Now, if you decide that you want to cut the head off that chicken and fry it up, Then it becomes an issue.

01:07:51.000 Well, it just becomes a different thing, right?

01:07:53.000 It becomes a different thing.

01:07:54.000 Yeah, it becomes a different thing.

01:07:55.000 When was the last time you ate meat?

01:07:57.000 So, it's been a while.

01:07:59.000 How many years?

01:08:00.000 I went vegan and...

01:08:02.000 It's been about eight years now.

01:08:05.000 Eight?

01:08:05.000 Coming up on nine, maybe.

01:08:06.000 Wow.

01:08:07.000 Do you ever smell like your neighbor cooking a steak and go...

01:08:11.000 Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm not one of those people who's like, oh, it repulses me and I want to throw up.

01:08:16.000 You know, like, I got into it for health reasons, right?

01:08:19.000 And, you know, listen, I've eaten more meat in my lifetime than any human being ever should.

01:08:24.000 It's like, I'm not, you know, I like it.

01:08:27.000 I drive by McDonald's or Jack in the Box and I smell that, and that might disgust some people, but it triggers this addictive response in me where it's like, I will crave that.

01:08:38.000 Because so much time has passed between me and eating those foods, I don't have that sort of obsessive-compulsive thing that kicks in.

01:08:46.000 I'm a recovering alcoholic.

01:08:50.000 You know, I can get addicted to things pretty fucking easy, right? 0.86

01:08:54.000 So, that's part of my thing. 0.60

01:08:56.000 Like, for me to draw a line, you know, kind of a line in the sand and say, like, no more is kind of the way that I have to do it.

01:09:03.000 Right.

01:09:03.000 Because otherwise, it inhabits my consciousness too much.

01:09:06.000 Right, you have to put up boundaries, or the insurmountable boundaries.

01:09:09.000 Yeah, like, there are certain...

01:09:12.000 Diets that say, oh, you can have a cheat day, right?

01:09:15.000 So it's like if you told me that I could have In-N-Out Burger like once a week, like I would spend six days thinking about the day that I could have In-N-Out Burger.

01:09:24.000 You know what I mean?

01:09:24.000 Like in order to free myself from that prison, I need time away.

01:09:30.000 So it's really powerful with me, whether it's a cheeseburger or a drink or a drug.

01:09:38.000 And that's just me.

01:09:39.000 That's just my experience.

01:09:40.000 But when I smell that, yeah, it triggers that thing.

01:09:43.000 I'm like, oh, that smells good.

01:09:44.000 But it passes quickly.

01:09:46.000 But if I was eating those things, I might find myself driving into the drive-thru.

01:09:50.000 That's an issue with people that have eating disorders, where it's almost like the desire to have that forbidden food overwhelms their desire to be healthy.

01:10:04.000 It just becomes this thing, like, I've got to itch it.

01:10:08.000 I've got to itch it.

01:10:09.000 I'm itchy, I've got to scratch it.

01:10:11.000 I can't help it.

01:10:13.000 Yeah, it transcends logic and rational thought.

01:10:16.000 It becomes psychological.

01:10:17.000 It becomes a psychological issue.

01:10:18.000 Way more than it is a physiological issue.

01:10:21.000 It's almost beyond psychology, though.

01:10:24.000 Like, it's so embedded.

01:10:26.000 Right.

01:10:27.000 I mean, for anybody who's truly, like, an addict or an alcoholic, like, it goes to the core.

01:10:33.000 You know, there is no overriding it.

01:10:36.000 When that kicks in, it's just, it's happening.

01:10:40.000 I had a friend who was on the Atkins diet, my friend Eddie Bravo.

01:10:43.000 He was on the Atkins diet, and he would do it for six days a week. 0.99

01:10:47.000 And then midnight on Saturday night, that motherfucker would go off the rails like a runaway train piloted by a meth addict. 1.00

01:10:55.000 Oh my god, you'd go crazy. 1.00

01:10:58.000 Right, so what do you intuit from that, right?

01:11:01.000 Like, he's building up all week.

01:11:04.000 Yes.

01:11:05.000 It worked, though.

01:11:06.000 But why would you...

01:11:07.000 I'm not saying that an Atkins diet is a healthy diet, because I don't think it is, but...

01:11:12.000 What's wrong with an Atkins diet, if you could say so, from an expert perspective?

01:11:15.000 Well, I mean, I'm not a nutritional scientist or a doctor, but I would say that...

01:11:21.000 A diet that's super focused on basically excluding anything with any carbohydrates in it and eating foods that are devoid of any fiber, which I think is really important.

01:11:34.000 We talk about protein a lot, but I think most people, I think that conversation should really be about fiber.

01:11:39.000 Like, nobody's protein deficient.

01:11:41.000 I think 3% of the population is protein deficient.

01:11:43.000 Most Americans are fiber deficient, though.

01:11:45.000 We just don't eat enough vegetables.

01:11:47.000 But is the Atkins diet fiber deficient?

01:11:49.000 I mean, you can eat broccoli.

01:11:51.000 I think that there is a focus on meat and dairy products, right?

01:11:56.000 I mean, I'm not an expert on the Atkins diet.

01:11:59.000 Achieving ketosis.

01:12:00.000 Yeah, it's like being in ketosis.

01:12:02.000 And that's a very hot-button thing.

01:12:06.000 You know, there are people that are all about like being in ketosis.

01:12:09.000 And my understanding of that is that it's kind of a crisis state for the human body.

01:12:13.000 It's not a natural state of being.

01:12:15.000 It's sort of like what your body has to do when it's being deprived of other nutrients to be in this state.

01:12:20.000 Like you put these acid ketones in your body, which then are converted to some form of glucose because you're so glucose deprived, right?

01:12:28.000 Our brains run on glucose.

01:12:30.000 Our bodies need glucose.

01:12:31.000 You know, if you look at...

01:12:35.000 Look at, you know, the longest living pockets, pockets of civilization across the world where people live the longest and are the healthiest and are the happiest.

01:12:43.000 Like the Blue Zones.

01:12:44.000 Have you heard of the Blue Zones?

01:12:45.000 Right?

01:12:45.000 So, Dan Buettner, who's the guy who traveled all these places, is a friend of mine.

01:12:50.000 He's an amazing guy.

01:12:51.000 You should have him on the podcast.

01:12:51.000 He's amazing.

01:12:52.000 What's his name?

01:12:53.000 Dan Buettner.

01:12:54.000 B-U-E-T-T-N-E-R. He's a National Geographic fellow. 1.00

01:13:00.000 He's so impressive.

01:13:02.000 What is he doing?

01:13:03.000 What does he do?

01:13:04.000 Well, he's the guy who wrote the Blue Zones books.

01:13:07.000 So he was like a global adventurer who set like three world records, like cycling across the planet, doing all these crazy things.

01:13:17.000 Whoa! 0.71

01:13:17.000 Cycling? 0.71

01:13:17.000 Well, he rode his bike across Africa, like north to south, I think. 0.71

01:13:21.000 What the fuck? 1.00

01:13:22.000 He rode across Russia. 1.00

01:13:24.000 This was when he was younger.

01:13:26.000 And then, you know, he became interested in indigenous populations.

01:13:31.000 He started working with National Geographic.

01:13:33.000 He became a writer.

01:13:34.000 And in his travels, he became obsessed with, you know, finding places where people are the happiest, live the longest, free of disease, etc.

01:13:44.000 And that ultimately became what are today known as the Blue Zones, like these little sort of hidden pockets of the planet.

01:13:53.000 I think?

01:14:10.000 How's that work?

01:14:11.000 It's a cultural thing because it's a community of Seventh-day Adventists, and it's a very strong faith-based community that also basically subsists on a plant-based diet.

01:14:22.000 And they live incredibly long.

01:14:25.000 There you go.

01:14:26.000 So, the Seventh-day Adventists?

01:14:29.000 How do you say it?

01:14:30.000 Seventh-day Adventists?

01:14:32.000 Adventists? 0.99

01:14:32.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.99

01:14:32.000 It's a weird word. 0.99

01:14:33.000 You say it even if you're saying it correctly, it seems like you're doing it wrong.

01:14:37.000 Adventists? 0.99

01:14:37.000 It's a very strong, you know, faith-based community. 0.99

01:14:40.000 Plant-based diet, moderate physical activity, social engagement.

01:14:45.000 Social engagement is important.

01:14:46.000 It's huge.

01:14:47.000 And so from studying these cultures, he extracted certain kind of guiding principles about how they live their life.

01:14:57.000 And one of them, to get back to the question about kind of Atkins and diet, is, you know, they all eat a very starchy, you know, fiber-rich, essentially plant-based diet.

01:15:07.000 It doesn't mean they're all vegans, like they eat a little bit of meat, but essentially their diet is founded upon Starchy vegetables, for the most part.

01:15:14.000 And community and accountability and kind of keeping your elders around and all these sorts of things have really, you know, distinguishes them as, you know, from the way that we live our lives now, right?

01:15:29.000 Like, you know, we're isolated, we're fast-paced.

01:15:32.000 All these sorts of, you know, kind of principles upon which we navigate our day are just very divorced from the way that these people are living.

01:15:40.000 I love that it says empowered women.

01:15:43.000 Empowered women is a factor in age. 1.00

01:15:47.000 That's fascinating.

01:15:49.000 I wonder what that's about.

01:15:50.000 A big part of it, too...

01:15:52.000 I had Dan on my podcast, so if people are listening, they can check him out.

01:15:55.000 He's great.

01:15:56.000 But a big part of it, too, is having purpose.

01:16:01.000 Like, sort of identifying early on in your life...

01:16:23.000 Mm-hmm.

01:16:26.000 Yeah, sort of low-grade exercise.

01:16:29.000 These people, you know, they're always moving.

01:16:32.000 You know, they're not out running.

01:16:33.000 They're not on the treadmill, but they're in their garden, and they're walking to their friend's house.

01:16:38.000 And, you know, they're very engaged with their community, you know, in a very intimate way.

01:16:43.000 Yeah.

01:16:44.000 Do you know, I had Aubrey de Grey on the other day, who's a life extension scientist at the forefront of the various technologies that are being developed to extend life.

01:16:56.000 He said the difference between the average and these cultures where they live far longer is four years. 0.99

01:17:04.000 That's this big goal that everybody's trying to attain.

01:17:08.000 Live like these people that live the longest, that's four years.

01:17:12.000 There's a four year difference.

01:17:14.000 Right.

01:17:15.000 Well, I think, you know, in these blue zones, they have the highest percentage per capita of centenarians, like people living more than 100. But I think it's less about that age than it is about the quality of your years, right?

01:17:24.000 Right.

01:17:24.000 Like, you know, listen, go to the airport and look at how many people are, like, in wheelchairs and, you know, on walkers and stuff like that.

01:17:31.000 People that are not old.

01:17:33.000 Go to Disneyland.

01:17:34.000 Yeah, it's crazy.

01:17:34.000 You ever go to Disneyland and see the people on scooters?

01:17:37.000 Yeah.

01:17:38.000 Overflowing out of the side of the scooters with their legs and their gut and just...

01:17:42.000 Whew! 0.99

01:17:43.000 Right.

01:17:44.000 So, right now in America, you know, we can split hairs over, you know, should you take fish oil or not, or is it okay for you to eat the eggs from your chicken in your backyard?

01:17:54.000 But the truth is, this is not the problem that we need to be talking about.

01:17:58.000 We need to be talking about the fact that...

01:18:00.000 One out of every three Americans is going to die of a heart attack, and 70% of Americans are obese or overweight, and they're predicting that by 2030, 50% of Americans are going to be diabetic or pre-diabetic.

01:18:13.000 What?

01:18:14.000 Is that real?

01:18:15.000 By 2030, 50% of Americans are going to be diabetic or pre-diabetic.

01:18:20.000 Diabetes is insane.

01:18:22.000 That's insane.

01:18:23.000 One out of every three people is going to die of heart disease.

01:18:27.000 Wow.

01:18:27.000 Heart disease is a lifestyle and food-borne illness.

01:18:31.000 It doesn't have to exist.

01:18:33.000 And we're in this place right now where it's sort of like...

01:18:36.000 Well, I mean, there's obviously some congenital versions of it.

01:18:37.000 There is, for sure.

01:18:39.000 But that's not where...

01:18:40.000 But if you look back through, you know, the sort of history of mankind, there are plenty of populations that existed for, you know, hundreds and thousands of years without any significant incidence of heart disease.

01:18:53.000 You know, especially in, you know, rural areas of China, you know, for long years until we started exporting our diet and lifestyle overseas.

01:19:03.000 And now, you know, it's sort of like...

01:19:06.000 The latest installment of the Avengers, you know, we're sending these fast food restaurants to these places and they're having, and as the sort of ascension of the middle class in China, you know, continues and they can afford to, you know, sort of purchase more meat products, they're having disease problems that they haven't seen,

01:19:25.000 you know, it's unprecedented in the history of their culture.

01:19:29.000 So it seems also there's a real issue with human beings when it comes to patterns of behavior and habit that they're very very difficult to break and Like as you were saying before like if you could have a day where you could cheat that day That would become the habit and then it would just you would be thinking about that one day like it's very hard for people who are extremely obese Who just their their main form of pleasure is my pleasure,

01:19:54.000 of course Of course.

01:19:55.000 It's hardwired. 1.00

01:19:55.000 They get that food, they stuff it in their face, and then that's what they're, oh man, that fucking corn dog is so good. 1.00

01:20:02.000 And that's where they're getting their pleasure from. 1.00

01:20:04.000 Of course.

01:20:04.000 It's hard to deviate from that.

01:20:06.000 It's hard to change your patterns.

01:20:07.000 Yeah, you are managing your emotional well-being through the food choices that you make.

01:20:14.000 Good way of putting it.

01:20:15.000 There's a great book called Salt, Sugar, Fat by this guy called Michael Morris.

01:20:20.000 And he kind of looks at these big food companies and draws an analogy to the tobacco companies in the 70s in the way that these companies are funneling money and research and marketing dollars into devising food products that are specifically designed to activate that pleasure center in your brain,

01:20:41.000 right?

01:20:42.000 So that they know they're like they're trying to make that food impossible for you to just have one.

01:20:47.000 And once you kind of, you know, tap into that, that, you know, ability to trigger that response in somebody, and you create a habit out of that, an addictive response, then you have a customer for life.

01:21:01.000 Right? 0.99

01:21:01.000 You know, it's like, why is it so hard to eat one fucking chip? 0.99

01:21:05.000 You know, there's a reason behind that. 0.99

01:21:07.000 There's something about the proportion of salt And grease, you know, that will just trigger something in somebody.

01:21:18.000 You know, there's a feeling that you have when you do indulge in some really shitty food that you have. 0.70

01:21:24.000 You're just like, ugh. 0.99

01:21:25.000 After it's over, you feel like such a loser. 0.99

01:21:28.000 Right.

01:21:29.000 If I eat, like, a bag of chips.

01:21:32.000 Yeah, you go into a shame spiral.

01:21:33.000 Mm-hmm.

01:21:33.000 I feel angry at myself.

01:21:35.000 Fucking dummy. 1.00

01:21:36.000 Eat a bag of chips. 1.00

01:21:38.000 I know, but when you're doing it, you're like...

01:21:41.000 I can't even help myself.

01:21:42.000 It's hard. 0.98

01:21:42.000 I'm like a greedy, greedy monster. 0.98

01:21:45.000 Like, you know what? 0.55

01:21:46.000 I have a real weakness for those sea salt and vinegar potato chips.

01:21:53.000 Good God, they're good.

01:21:55.000 The real thick ones.

01:21:55.000 The kettle chip ones?

01:21:57.000 Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

01:21:58.000 Oh, they're so good!

01:21:59.000 And you look at the bag and it says non-GMO on the front.

01:22:02.000 You're like, oh, okay.

01:22:04.000 Non-GMO. Excellent.

01:22:06.000 I don't want a GMO potato.

01:22:09.000 I mean, are there even GMO potatoes?

01:22:12.000 You don't have to.

01:22:13.000 Potatoes last a long time.

01:22:14.000 I don't think so.

01:22:15.000 You don't need to, right?

01:22:18.000 Yeah.

01:22:18.000 Heading in that direction, though.

01:22:21.000 Do you eat potato chips?

01:22:22.000 That's my guilty pleasure.

01:22:24.000 It's tough.

01:22:25.000 The kettle chips are tough. 0.97

01:22:26.000 Fucking real hard, right? 0.96

01:22:27.000 I'm like, oh, that's vegan, you know? 0.99

01:22:32.000 Vegan can be bad. 0.70

01:22:33.000 I have a friend who's vegan. 1.00

01:22:34.000 He's fat as fuck. 1.00

01:22:35.000 Well, it's never been easier to be an unhealthy vegan. 1.00

01:22:39.000 I mean, you just walk the aisles at Whole Foods or Erwan.

01:22:41.000 There's so many vegan ice creams now and meat alternatives.

01:22:48.000 Pasta sauce.

01:22:49.000 Things that are tasty.

01:22:50.000 Spaghetti is totally vegan if you get it from the right place.

01:22:54.000 Oh, yeah.

01:22:55.000 Without egg.

01:22:56.000 Yeah, so there's plenty of options now.

01:22:58.000 And so just because you're vegan, that doesn't mean that you're eating a healthy diet, for sure.

01:23:04.000 You know, that's important, I think, for people to understand.

01:23:06.000 Yeah.

01:23:06.000 And there's a lot of people also that think that drinking juice, drinking fruit juice is really good for you.

01:23:12.000 Be careful about that, folks, because, like, you're not supposed to...

01:23:15.000 If you drink, like, a quart of orange juice...

01:23:18.000 That's not how that juice is supposed to get to your body. 1.00

01:23:21.000 The way the juice is supposed to get to your body is by eating a fucking orange. 0.99

01:23:24.000 Exactly. 1.00

01:23:25.000 Yeah, when you drink like a quart of pineapple juice, like what a fucking shock of sugar to your system. 0.98

01:23:31.000 Just because it's attached to fruit, which we assume rightly so, is healthy. 1.00

01:23:37.000 Just have some goddamn fruit. 0.99

01:23:39.000 Drink some water while you're having a big plate of pineapple, and you'll be way better off than drinking pineapple juice. 1.00

01:23:46.000 Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more.

01:23:47.000 You know, we were talking about fiber.

01:23:49.000 It's like, why would you remove all the fiber from that plant?

01:23:52.000 Exactly.

01:23:52.000 I think juicing has its place, though, but there's a huge difference between that gallon of Tropicana at the grocery store and cold-pressing some kale and spinach with some turmeric in it.

01:24:04.000 That's different.

01:24:05.000 You know what I mean?

01:24:05.000 Because it doesn't have the sugar.

01:24:07.000 Yeah.

01:24:07.000 The sugar's the real issue, right?

01:24:10.000 I look at it as medicinal.

01:24:13.000 It's like if you want a really concentrated dose of micronutrients and the kinds of highly compacted vitamins and minerals that you can get in some of these foods, these plants, then it has its place.

01:24:29.000 But to run 20 oranges through a juicer and drink that, you're getting a huge amount of sugar in that.

01:24:36.000 And you're depriving yourself of the digestive process and the fiber that comes with just eating the whole food.

01:24:42.000 Nature figured it out, man.

01:24:44.000 Why are you trying to...

01:24:45.000 The more you focus on eating these kinds of foods close to their natural state, your palate changes and you start to desire them.

01:24:54.000 I know these guys...

01:24:55.000 That are fruitarian.

01:24:58.000 All they eat is fruit.

01:24:59.000 Their whole lifestyle, right?

01:25:01.000 It's called the 80-10-10 diet.

01:25:04.000 80% carbs, 10% protein, 10% fat.

01:25:08.000 But essentially what it means is they eat fruit all day long.

01:25:11.000 That's it.

01:25:12.000 Totally raw.

01:25:13.000 They'll eat like 30 bananas a day.

01:25:14.000 I've heard of these guys.

01:25:16.000 Right.

01:25:16.000 And so, you know, somebody who is...

01:25:20.000 From the Atkins ketosis low-carb camp will tell you that that's an extremely unhealthy thing to do.

01:25:26.000 Now, I'm not a fruitarian.

01:25:28.000 I don't have any direct experience with that.

01:25:30.000 I don't know what the long-term ramifications of living that lifestyle are, but I do know people that live this way, and they're super healthy people, and some of them are amazing athletes, like my friend Michael Arnstein.

01:25:45.000 He's fruitarian.

01:25:46.000 He has been forever.

01:25:47.000 And he was like the fifth fastest guy at the New York City Marathon not too many years ago.

01:25:52.000 Like an elite athlete, you know, who's eating this way.

01:25:55.000 That's interesting.

01:25:56.000 Literally, he has to eat so much fruit that he has like two giant extra refrigerators in his house.

01:26:03.000 And he would have to drive this big truck to like a fruit wholesaler once a week.

01:26:07.000 And like the guy at the wholesaler thought that he had like a bodega or something like that.

01:26:12.000 Because he couldn't believe how much fruit this guy was buying, you know?

01:26:15.000 One of the UFC fighters eats like that.

01:26:17.000 I believe Nate Diaz eats like that.

01:26:18.000 I think he's on that 30 bananas a day.

01:26:20.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:26:21.000 But that didn't work. 1.00

01:26:23.000 He got his ass kicked. 0.99

01:26:24.000 Yeah, I mean, Mac Danzig was playing around with it for a while. 0.99

01:26:27.000 I don't know if he's still on it, but people that I've talked to who have dabbled in it say that when they're doing it, they feel amazing.

01:26:34.000 And these people are trim, and they don't have...

01:26:36.000 Look, they're not getting diabetes, and they're getting a tremendous amount of glucose.

01:26:40.000 They're also getting a huge amount of fiber.

01:26:42.000 And they're still meeting their protein needs, which is interesting.

01:26:46.000 So when I look at that, it just makes me, you know, it gives me a different perspective on this obsession that we have with protein.

01:26:54.000 Like everyone's walking around worried about, you know, meeting their protein needs.

01:26:57.000 And the truth is, is that, you know, the average semi-sedentary person is eating two to five times the recommended daily allowance of protein.

01:27:07.000 Like it's just, it's a non-issue.

01:27:08.000 It's really kind of a red herring.

01:27:10.000 I should clarify that Nate Diaz was probably injured.

01:27:13.000 I think there was something wrong with him in his last fight.

01:27:15.000 It had nothing to do with his diet. 0.99

01:27:16.000 I'm just fucking around. 0.97

01:27:17.000 And he also fought Rafael Dos Anjos, which is one of the best fighters in the world. 0.98

01:27:21.000 He was the current champion.

01:27:22.000 So his diet, I'm sure, had nothing to do with him losing.

01:27:25.000 But is there higher dietary requirements of protein for people that, say, compete in powerlifting or things along those lines?

01:27:32.000 And are there any powerlifters that are vegan?

01:27:35.000 There is a guy called Patrick Baboumian.

01:27:39.000 He's a German dude, German strongman.

01:27:41.000 This dude is the human Wolverine. 0.99

01:27:44.000 He's insane.

01:27:44.000 And I had the privilege.

01:27:46.000 I made a YouTube video of it.

01:27:47.000 Maybe you guys can pull it up.

01:27:49.000 I was on stage with him at an event in Toronto a couple years ago.

01:27:53.000 Where he attempted to break a Guinness Book of World Record by carrying more weight than any other human being ever had.

01:28:01.000 He put 1,200 pounds on a chassis that he carried.

01:28:04.000 He had to carry it 10 meters.

01:28:06.000 And he accomplished it.

01:28:08.000 It was extraordinary.

01:28:09.000 And the guy's totally vegan.

01:28:11.000 Wow.

01:28:11.000 Pull that up.

01:28:12.000 Didn't that guy, the Mountain from Game of Thrones, just break that though?

01:28:16.000 I think he did like 1,600 pounds.

01:28:19.000 Yeah, he's like one of the strongest men in the world.

01:28:22.000 Oh, the dude?

01:28:22.000 He's going to be Aquaman, that guy?

01:28:24.000 No, no, no.

01:28:25.000 He's the mountain in the Game of Thrones.

01:28:27.000 He's from Iceland.

01:28:28.000 I'm a little bit behind.

01:28:30.000 Enormous, enormous man.

01:28:31.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:28:32.000 Okay, here's the guy.

01:28:33.000 Go full screen on that. 0.99

01:28:34.000 Can you or will it fuck us up? 0.99

01:28:37.000 Our video is all fucking weird here because we do it off of TriCaster. 0.98

01:28:40.000 Oh, I've got to tell you, I met one of the guys that works at TriCaster.

01:28:43.000 We're hooked up.

01:28:45.000 Look at this guy.

01:28:45.000 So that's 1,200 pounds.

01:28:47.000 Yeah.

01:28:47.000 Why does that not look like 1,200 pounds?

01:28:48.000 It's kind of dark.

01:28:49.000 That doesn't look like 1,200 pounds.

01:28:51.000 It definitely is. 0.99

01:28:51.000 There were all these people there verifying it and they have all these scales and shit. 0.99

01:28:53.000 How the fuck is that 1,200 pounds? 0.99

01:28:55.000 That doesn't seem like it's 1,200 pounds. 0.98

01:28:57.000 Why does that look so light?

01:29:00.000 I assure you that it was.

01:29:01.000 How dare you?

01:29:02.000 How dare you lie to me about that?

01:29:03.000 That's like 50 pounds.

01:29:06.000 Do you guys grade it on a scale because he's vegan?

01:29:09.000 Like it's not really 1,200 pounds like dog ears?

01:29:13.000 A vegan 1,200 pounds, which is 120 pounds?

01:29:16.000 Well, he's enormous. 1.00

01:29:17.000 That guy's fucking giant. 0.99

01:29:18.000 And so, whatever it is, that guy got all that muscle from being a vegan. 1.00

01:29:22.000 Like a bull.

01:29:24.000 Bulls eat grass.

01:29:25.000 He hasn't been a vegan his entire life, so it's not like he was reared that way.

01:29:29.000 But I think he's been that way long enough, and he will tell you that His strength training improved and his agility and his ability to recover was significantly enhanced when he changed his diet to this.

01:29:40.000 Yeah, here's Mountain.

01:29:40.000 Thousand-year-old weightlifting record.

01:29:43.000 He put this fucking huge log on his back. 0.99

01:29:46.000 That guy's enormous. 1.00

01:29:48.000 A terrifying human being.

01:29:49.000 Yeah, it's a different animal.

01:29:51.000 Especially Iceland.

01:29:52.000 There's something about Iceland.

01:29:54.000 Did you ever see that Vice piece on Iceland, the strongmen of Iceland?

01:29:58.000 No.

01:29:58.000 Vice did a whole video on it.

01:30:00.000 Like, apparently the people in Iceland, they have a long history of being like strongmen competitors for whatever reason. 0.96

01:30:08.000 Yeah, there's fucking giant dudes out there, former Vikings or something. 0.88

01:30:12.000 Yeah, it's interesting. 0.92

01:30:13.000 I mean, I think, you know, to your point, your question was, you know, do you think that somebody who's of that ilk or, you know, like a power lifter or strength athlete, if their protein requirements are higher?

01:30:25.000 I don't know.

01:30:26.000 I know that Patrick supplements with plant-based protein powders from time to time.

01:30:32.000 I don't know that...

01:30:34.000 He probably is taking in somewhere between 80 to 100 grams a day.

01:30:39.000 So it's not...

01:30:40.000 Yeah, like pea, brown rice, hemp protein.

01:30:43.000 I like hemp protein.

01:30:44.000 I think it's great.

01:30:45.000 Complete amino acid profile.

01:30:47.000 I mean, essentially...

01:30:49.000 Look, it's complicated, right?

01:30:51.000 We can't be reductionist about it.

01:30:54.000 But in the most general sense, when we're talking about protein, we're talking about amino acids, right?

01:30:59.000 We're talking about the building blocks of protein, and we're specifically talking about the nine amino acids, you know, the essential amino acids that we can't synthesize on our own, that we have to get from the foods that we eat, right?

01:31:10.000 So it's a question of making sure that we are ingesting those nine essential amino acids.

01:31:17.000 So does it matter where they come from?

01:31:19.000 In what form they are delivered to your body?

01:31:22.000 Does it matter if it's in hemp or if it's in steak?

01:31:28.000 We don't know.

01:31:29.000 Yeah, we don't know.

01:31:30.000 All I can tell you is that I seem to be doing okay with it.

01:31:35.000 And I can just share my experience with it.

01:31:37.000 That's all.

01:31:38.000 Yeah, there was that issue where Travis Barker was in that plane crash.

01:31:42.000 Do you know that story?

01:31:43.000 Travis Barker, the drummer?

01:31:45.000 Yeah.

01:31:46.000 I see him at GC Ladies all the time.

01:31:48.000 Yeah, he's in the neighborhood.

01:31:50.000 He was in a plane crash and had to get skin grafts and got off of his vegan diet.

01:31:57.000 Because of that.

01:31:58.000 Like, he was having a hard time healing and started eating meat, and he healed much quicker.

01:32:03.000 Yeah, I don't know.

01:32:04.000 I hadn't heard that.

01:32:05.000 But that's one of those things...

01:32:07.000 Pretty sure he's, you know, he's pretty hardcore vegan.

01:32:11.000 He's a partner in that restaurant, Crossroads.

01:32:13.000 Have you been to Crossroads?

01:32:14.000 No, where's that?

01:32:15.000 Phenomenal restaurant.

01:32:16.000 Is that a vegan restaurant?

01:32:17.000 It's in Hollywood, yeah.

01:32:19.000 But it's Tal Ronan, who's a chef there, is a mastermind.

01:32:22.000 He's a genius, and the food is extraordinary.

01:32:24.000 You should check it out.

01:32:26.000 Okay.

01:32:26.000 I'm just stating what I heard, what I read about him after the accident.

01:32:32.000 I hadn't heard that.

01:32:33.000 Is there any properties that would exist in flesh and blood and eating meat that would somehow or another benefit you recovering from an injury?

01:32:42.000 Does that make sense?

01:32:43.000 Yeah, I don't, you know, that would expedite that process.

01:32:48.000 I mean, there are, there's a difference between the way I feel when I eat, like, wild game versus the way I feel when I eat steak that's, like, raised, factory-raised steak or whatever.

01:33:01.000 There's a difference in the way your body reacts to it.

01:33:04.000 There's a feeling that you eat, especially like mousse.

01:33:07.000 Mousse is very unusual for whatever reason.

01:33:10.000 When you eat mousse, you almost feel like it's a stimulant.

01:33:13.000 It's very strange.

01:33:16.000 Because you eat it rare, it's very lean, and there's this weird like, ooh, like you get a charge after it.

01:33:24.000 Very similar to what I get when I eat kale shakes.

01:33:27.000 When I eat kale shakes, one of the things that I tell people, if you want to change your diet, here's one of the best ways.

01:33:34.000 Eat something healthy, get a positive reaction from that, and you want to repeat it.

01:33:37.000 And one of the best positive reactions I've ever gotten is I drink these kale shakes in the morning.

01:33:43.000 I call them Hulk loads.

01:33:45.000 I talk about it all the time.

01:33:46.000 It's kale, cucumber, celery, Yeah.

01:34:08.000 Yeah, that'll get it done, right?

01:34:10.000 And that's what I say to people all the time.

01:34:12.000 They're like, I'm like, look, man, don't worry about whether you're going to do this all the way or what you're going to do tomorrow.

01:34:19.000 Just like wake up and drink that salad for breakfast and make that connection with how you feel.

01:34:25.000 Because truly, nothing will make you feel better in the morning than drinking a super nutrient-dense green shake.

01:34:33.000 Yeah.

01:34:33.000 It's just, you know, I mean, whether it has, you know, you can have variations on a theme, like I do something similar, it's a little bit different, and it's never the same, you know, I change it from day to day or whatever.

01:34:43.000 But once you make that connection, and you're like, oh, wow, you know, then that starts to change the microbial ecology in your gut.

01:34:51.000 Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it?

01:34:53.000 And I think we talked about this last time too, like all these studies that are coming out about how important your microbiome is to all kinds of things that impact your health and how there's some evidence to suggest...

01:35:09.000 That the quality of your gut biome can impact your cravings, right?

01:35:14.000 Oh, for sure.

01:35:15.000 Sugar, that's a real issue with sugar, right?

01:35:17.000 And so when people say, well, I just crave this, you know, my body's telling me that I need it.

01:35:21.000 Well, that's not an objective analysis, right?

01:35:24.000 Just because you crave something, that doesn't mean that your body needs it.

01:35:28.000 It might, though.

01:35:29.000 Maybe it does.

01:35:30.000 It might, but it might not.

01:35:31.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:35:32.000 So how do you discern between the two?

01:35:35.000 Yeah, that's an interesting point.

01:35:37.000 That's absolutely a fact when it comes to gut microbes, when it comes to sugar.

01:35:42.000 That if you feed those microbes a lot of sugar, they become dependent upon it, and they want it.

01:35:47.000 Yeah, they need it to survive, and so they're impulsing you.

01:35:49.000 I need more of that.

01:35:50.000 Isn't that bizarre?

01:35:51.000 And then you're in this cycle.

01:35:52.000 So they analyzed the gut biome of people that are like chocoholics, right? 1.00

01:35:57.000 And it was very different from people that are ambivalent about chocolate.

01:36:01.000 That's such a bizarre thing that you could have these organisms living inside your intestinal tract that are actually changing the way you crave things.

01:36:10.000 So they're sending some sort of stimulus that gets to your brain and it's altering the way you want to.

01:36:17.000 Food in your body.

01:36:18.000 Well, it's an assault to your idea that you're a sentient human being who is in control of your thoughts.

01:36:24.000 And then that leads to, you know, the question of higher consciousness versus, you know, the sort of looping, you know, kind of thing that your brain can do, right?

01:36:34.000 Like, what is that?

01:36:35.000 You know, when you observe your own thoughts, what is it that you're, who's the observer?

01:36:40.000 Right.

01:36:40.000 You know what I mean?

01:36:41.000 Like, so...

01:36:42.000 Yeah.

01:36:44.000 So we can get down that rabbit hole.

01:36:47.000 You know what I mean?

01:36:48.000 Like, if you're having a dream, and you're having a conversation with somebody in a dream, and you're surprised at what somebody tells you, but you're imagining that, right?

01:36:58.000 Right.

01:36:58.000 Because you didn't know in your dream that that person was going to say that thing to you.

01:37:03.000 But on some level, obviously, you did.

01:37:04.000 Well, that's the complex nuances of creativity, right?

01:37:07.000 For sure.

01:37:08.000 And the complex nuances of just consciousness.

01:37:12.000 Yes.

01:37:14.000 Yeah.

01:37:15.000 The idea that there could be microbes in your body that are stimulating and changing the way your brain functions seems so alien to people because we like to think of ourselves as autonomous.

01:37:25.000 Right.

01:37:25.000 But we're not.

01:37:26.000 We're far more microbes than human.

01:37:29.000 Way more. 0.97

01:37:29.000 I can't remember what the percentage is, but it's ridiculous. 0.97

01:37:32.000 The number of microorganisms trumps the number of cells you have in your body by a factor of, I don't know if it's 10 or something crazy.

01:37:42.000 Well, there's more E. coli living in your gut than there have ever been people, ever.

01:37:48.000 That's real.

01:37:49.000 Those are real numbers.

01:37:51.000 And it's not, you know, you have to have a healthy symbiotic relationship with this, right?

01:37:56.000 Like, you need it to live.

01:37:57.000 It's part of being healthy.

01:37:59.000 Yeah, we talked about this, I believe, last time, various forms of probiotics that you engage in.

01:38:05.000 Sauerkraut, I think you said one of them.

01:38:06.000 Yeah, kimchi. 0.99

01:38:07.000 I love kimchi.

01:38:08.000 Kimchi's great.

01:38:09.000 Love that stuff. 0.99

01:38:10.000 Boy, my wife fucking hates it, though. 1.00

01:38:12.000 Yeah, it's good. 1.00

01:38:12.000 Says it makes me smell. 1.00

01:38:13.000 Tough shit. 1.00

01:38:14.000 Yeah, kombucha. 1.00

01:38:15.000 Yeah.

01:38:15.000 I love that stuff, too.

01:38:16.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:38:16.000 But you know what pisses me off, man?

01:38:19.000 That GT's kombucha had to pull the really good stuff and put that watered-down horseshit because it's more than one half of 1% alcohol because of the fermentation process and the microbes.

01:38:30.000 Yeah, a tiny trace of fermentation that left a little bit of alcohol in it that caused this whole thing, and they had to pull everything.

01:38:38.000 Manny state! 0.98

01:38:39.000 We started making our own?

01:38:40.000 Have you ever made your own kombucha?

01:38:41.000 Yes, I did.

01:38:42.000 So you have the big scoby?

01:38:43.000 I've been a kombucha drinker since 94. Oh, wow.

01:38:46.000 And when I started drinking it, Andy Dick turned me on to it. 0.98

01:38:50.000 Andy Dick gave me a fucking slab of kombucha fungus to take home, and I got a bowl, and I started brewing it in my refrigerator. 0.99

01:39:01.000 That's... 0.99

01:39:02.000 Oh, gee, man.

01:39:02.000 Old school.

01:39:03.000 That was long before, you know, GTs or anybody was doing this.

01:39:07.000 Oh, you couldn't buy it. 0.98

01:39:07.000 I used to have a bowl, like a huge salad bowl in my refrigerator with a fucking living fungus in it. 0.98

01:39:15.000 And I would have the saran wrap on it and there was sugar and stuff in the bowl. 0.93

01:39:18.000 I forget what the ingredients were.

01:39:19.000 And it would feed off of that and I would leave it in there for a certain amount of time and then pour it into a glass and drink it.

01:39:24.000 It's great.

01:39:24.000 Yeah.

01:39:25.000 But it was too much of a pain in the ass. 0.99

01:39:26.000 And then somewhere in the late 90s, I started finding it in stores. 0.99

01:39:33.000 And then I got into it.

01:39:34.000 But now, I mean, I have a bunch here.

01:39:36.000 It's everywhere.

01:39:36.000 I don't go...

01:39:37.000 I mean, I drink it every day.

01:39:40.000 And when I go on the road, most of the times, I'll find a Whole Foods and I'll stock up on it and leave it in my hotel room.

01:39:48.000 I think it's...

01:39:48.000 Probiotics are so...

01:39:50.000 I'm very rarely sick.

01:39:52.000 I mean, very rarely.

01:39:53.000 And I travel a lot.

01:39:55.000 And one of the things that I attribute that to is probiotics.

01:39:58.000 I think that you really...

01:40:00.000 It's one of the unsung heroes of the immune system that people don't take into consideration.

01:40:05.000 The symbiotic relationship that we have with all these weird microorganisms that you ingest.

01:40:11.000 And the more of those you have...

01:40:14.000 The less deficits you have in terms of your nutritional intake and the more positive microbes and positive bio-organisms that you take into your body, the more you're going to have, the whole system's going to function better and you're going to be able to fight off immune or fight off disease better.

01:40:31.000 Yeah, for sure.

01:40:32.000 The example that I always give, I think I might have shared this last time, I'm not sure.

01:40:37.000 It was the last time was a long time ago, by the way.

01:40:39.000 Yeah, it was a long time ago.

01:40:39.000 Probably nobody saw that anyway.

01:40:40.000 But the example that I always give is...

01:40:43.000 It's from Super Size Me, the Morgan Spurlock documentary, where he decides he's going to eat McDonald's for 30 days straight.

01:40:49.000 And for people that saw the movie, you might remember that a couple days into this experiment, he can't imagine how he's going to make it through 30 days.

01:41:00.000 And there's that scene where he's in the car and he actually vomits out the window after he drinks a milkshake or something like that.

01:41:06.000 And he's just like, this is the worst.

01:41:08.000 And then fast forward like two weeks later, and there's a scene where he's like waking up in the morning, and he's like, I feel so sick.

01:41:17.000 He's like, I feel terrible.

01:41:18.000 He's like, let's go to McDonald's, you know, for his breakfast.

01:41:22.000 And then he eats his whatever he ate for breakfast at McDonald's that morning, and like, he walks out and he's like, I feel awesome.

01:41:30.000 You know, like, he had to get his fix.

01:41:35.000 And so...

01:41:37.000 What I see in that is somebody whose microbiome has adjusted.

01:41:41.000 He has replaced...

01:41:43.000 Because at the time, his girlfriend was a vegan chef, right?

01:41:48.000 So he was coming off of eating, essentially, a plant-based diet.

01:41:51.000 Goes into this McDonald's thing.

01:41:53.000 And by virtue of...

01:41:56.000 Bombarding his system with McDonald's food, he repopulates his gut biome with the kind of microorganisms that feed off McDonald's food, right?

01:42:07.000 So suddenly, you know, because those microorganisms are on the food that you're eating, right?

01:42:11.000 And then they seed into your gut, and then they start to propagate.

01:42:13.000 And suddenly, he's craving these foods that were making him sick two weeks earlier that he couldn't imagine continuing to eat.

01:42:21.000 That's the weirdest thing about diet is you're essentially creating a civilization in your body.

01:42:27.000 It's a trip.

01:42:28.000 It really is.

01:42:31.000 You're a super organism.

01:42:34.000 You are a container.

01:42:35.000 And human beings are the microbiome of the planet Earth, right?

01:42:39.000 Yeah.

01:42:40.000 Yeah.

01:42:40.000 I mean, that's a good sign that our Earth is sick when you check out our ocean.

01:42:46.000 We're an unhealthy gut bacteria for the planet.

01:42:49.000 In a lot of ways.

01:42:51.000 I mean, it really is.

01:42:52.000 It's almost like everything behaves in this sort of fractal manner where the bigger you get, and the Earth itself is probably a microbe in the greater sense of the galaxy, which is...

01:43:07.000 Microbe in the greater sense of the universe and it's all sort of connected in some weird way and the lower you get down to gut microbes and how you fuel those gut microbes and how it impacts the the health of the actual Superorganism itself the human being as a really fascinating it really is it really is when you stop and think about it because very few people think of themselves as being a host for life like I am just this I'm just trying to keep my garden healthy.

01:43:36.000 You know, the garden of my body, which is filled.

01:43:38.000 No, you think of it.

01:43:39.000 I am Rich Roll.

01:43:40.000 I am this one.

01:43:41.000 I am the one.

01:43:42.000 I am one.

01:43:43.000 I am one thing.

01:43:44.000 But you're not.

01:43:45.000 No one is one thing.

01:43:46.000 But the brain thinks it's one thing. 1.00

01:43:48.000 Which is a fucker, man. 1.00

01:43:50.000 What a weird thing that your brain doesn't realize, hey, you know, I'm getting all these signals to eat McDonald's because I've got all these weird asshole McDonald's bacteria living in my gut. 1.00

01:44:02.000 What I need to do, I need to get some cucumber bacteria down in there to fuck with the McDonald's bacteria. 1.00

01:44:10.000 It's a very fascinating thing to be a human being and to be completely disconnected from that reality without externally taking it in in the form of education and knowledge and then having to internalize it, having to think about it and go, 0.98

01:44:26.000 okay, I need to take into consideration that I am not just a one.

01:44:30.000 I am a container for all these different organisms and the amount of Positive organisms will directly affect the way the brain works. 0.99

01:44:41.000 Fuck. 1.00

01:44:43.000 That's hard to think, man. 1.00

01:44:45.000 That's hard to wrap your head around.

01:44:48.000 Then factor in the emotional override that takes over, that compels you to take an action irrespective of the logical choice after you've been educated.

01:44:58.000 Because I think that's equally as powerful, if not more powerful.

01:45:02.000 Yeah, and oftentimes that can be adjusted.

01:45:05.000 All of it can be adjusted with momentum. 0.70

01:45:08.000 If you can just fucking force yourself into a pattern that's more positive. 0.91

01:45:14.000 Just somehow or another say, okay. 0.98

01:45:16.000 You know, like some people say, I'm going to start training for a marathon.

01:45:19.000 I'm going to start on Monday, and Monday I'm going to run, you know...

01:45:22.000 Two miles and then, you know, I'm gonna be on the system of recovery and this is what I'm gonna do.

01:45:29.000 And you're gonna go into training.

01:45:30.000 I'm gonna start a training camp.

01:45:31.000 It's all written down.

01:45:32.000 And if you can do that, if you can do that with your diet, I can't tell you how many people have come up to me and said, I have lost a tremendous amount of weight since listening to your podcast because I started incorporating kale shakes into my diet.

01:45:47.000 That's my primary breakfast is a kale shake and it changed everything.

01:45:51.000 I mean, I'm talking about hundreds.

01:45:53.000 It's almost like a joke.

01:45:54.000 Like, I run into people and they go, dude, I lost 100 pounds from your podcast.

01:45:57.000 Okay, another guy.

01:45:58.000 It's almost like a joke.

01:45:59.000 Like, you guys are all...

01:46:00.000 I mean, you tweeted out that I was coming on the podcast and there's like 50, you know, comments after that about Hulk loads.

01:46:06.000 It's like all about the Hulk load.

01:46:08.000 Well, I added beets to the Hulk loads because of you.

01:46:11.000 Oh, you did?

01:46:12.000 You recommended, yeah.

01:46:13.000 Beets will get you out of bed in the morning.

01:46:15.000 Beets are fantastic.

01:46:16.000 That's the ultimate pre-workout boost.

01:46:19.000 What a nutrient-rich plant that is, or root that is.

01:46:22.000 They're amazing.

01:46:22.000 Just like the first time you do it, though, don't freak out the first time you take a dump.

01:46:27.000 I know, right?

01:46:28.000 It'll be all bloody red.

01:46:29.000 I'm dying!

01:46:30.000 Oh, I ate beets.

01:46:31.000 You know what's crazy?

01:46:33.000 I've actually done that.

01:46:34.000 You go to the store and you get the beets, right?

01:46:36.000 And you put them on the thing.

01:46:37.000 And unless you say otherwise, they're going to cut the beet greens off and throw them away.

01:46:42.000 That's the good stuff, man.

01:46:44.000 It's also good as well.

01:46:46.000 Yeah, it's definitely good as well.

01:46:47.000 I mean, I don't know why people don't think that that's edible.

01:46:49.000 Isn't that strange?

01:46:50.000 It's like we just have this idea that we're very rigid in our idea of what you eat and what you don't eat.

01:46:56.000 Just throw that out.

01:46:58.000 Chop that off. 1.00

01:46:58.000 Bee greens are awesome. 1.00

01:46:59.000 Yeah, they don't taste bad.

01:47:02.000 It's weird.

01:47:03.000 You never see a beet green salad.

01:47:06.000 That's not common.

01:47:08.000 You do at our house, Joe Rogan.

01:47:09.000 Whoa! 0.71

01:47:10.000 Rich Roll just called me out. 0.95

01:47:12.000 What are some other, like, I mean, here's a funny thing that I fucking saw the other day at Whole Foods. 0.56

01:47:18.000 Bok choy is the new kale. 0.99

01:47:20.000 How about it's bok choy, you fucks? 1.00

01:47:22.000 That's good, too. 0.99

01:47:23.000 It's not the new kale.

01:47:25.000 It's just marketing.

01:47:25.000 But what is that?

01:47:26.000 Why do people have to do that?

01:47:28.000 Why do they ruin everything with their nonsense? 0.95

01:47:31.000 Orange is the new black. 0.77

01:47:33.000 We live in a commercial society, right?

01:47:36.000 They've got to push something else out there.

01:47:39.000 I don't know.

01:47:39.000 It's the same thing that there's a...

01:47:43.000 Why BuzzFeed is always...

01:47:46.000 There's crazy headlines about crazy stuff that's inflammatory and whatever.

01:47:51.000 Clickbait.

01:47:52.000 Exactly.

01:47:53.000 Yeah.

01:47:53.000 Do you grow your own vegetables?

01:47:55.000 That's our next thing that we're looking into.

01:47:58.000 And we have a bunch of land, so it's underutilized.

01:48:02.000 And so we've just started meeting with a bunch of people to start growing.

01:48:06.000 Yeah, we've been doing that for a while now at my house.

01:48:09.000 And it's very rewarding to have...

01:48:11.000 We had a cucumber salad the other day.

01:48:13.000 Cucumber and tomato salad.

01:48:14.000 It was so good. 0.99

01:48:15.000 It was like, I saw this when it was a fucking seed in a little container and put it in the dirt and... 0.99

01:48:21.000 What do you use for fur? 0.99

01:48:23.000 Oh, you don't grow, so you don't have like...

01:48:24.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:48:25.000 I mean, you know, we'll get into that once we start growing.

01:48:28.000 But the one thing that we are doing, which is fucking awesome, is we started...

01:48:32.000 We have all these beehives now. 1.00

01:48:36.000 We have like 40 hives at our house that we're hosting for a friend who is like an organic beekeeper who creates his own honey.

01:48:46.000 And that's been super interesting.

01:48:47.000 Also for the kids to learn about what that's all about.

01:48:51.000 I mean, that is so interesting.

01:48:52.000 That's cool.

01:48:53.000 How it all works, which is really cool.

01:48:54.000 I want to do that.

01:48:55.000 And I also, I was thinking about doing that.

01:48:58.000 I was like, God, that's a lot of work. 0.98

01:48:59.000 I'm bringing a fucking beehive guy and all that. 0.89

01:49:01.000 But I found out about this new invention that this guy Yeah, he had like the craziest Kickstarter of all time. 0.98

01:49:11.000 Yeah, I retweeted it.

01:49:12.000 He raised like insane millions of dollars.

01:49:15.000 He was only trying to raise like 100 grand or 200 grand or something and he raised like 4 million dollars in like no time because his invention is so astounding.

01:49:23.000 Well, I was definitely a part of that because when I got it, it wasn't nearly that much. 0.89

01:49:26.000 I tweeted the shit out of that. 0.87

01:49:28.000 I thought it was amazing. 0.94

01:49:29.000 It's a tap.

01:49:30.000 You actually probably had a lot to do with him raising all that money.

01:49:33.000 I had a little bit of something.

01:49:34.000 I mean, I'm sure a lot of people reacted the way I... Well, look, the 100% of what had to do with it was this invention is amazing.

01:49:41.000 12 million! 0.99

01:49:42.000 Holy shit! 1.00

01:49:43.000 Yeah, 12 million. 0.99

01:49:44.000 Dude, when I looked at it, I swear to God, I don't think it was more than a couple hundred thousand dollars.

01:49:48.000 I mean, I think I looked at it maybe a couple weeks ago, and I think it was like at four.

01:49:55.000 Which is a lot!

01:49:56.000 That's amazing.

01:49:57.000 But it just shows how cool it is.

01:49:59.000 Well, a good idea, you know?

01:50:00.000 Well, let's play it, because it's really amazing.

01:50:02.000 If anybody hasn't heard...

01:50:03.000 The people that are listening, you're only going to hear it.

01:50:06.000 But this guy's invented a beehive that essentially has...

01:50:11.000 A dial that you can turn, and the dial changes the honeycombs into a flow pattern.

01:50:17.000 It actually opens up, and then the honey drips down slowly into these jars.

01:50:22.000 It doesn't disturb the bees.

01:50:24.000 It doesn't disturb any of the normal, natural processes that these bees engage in to make honey.

01:50:33.000 And it's so much less invasive.

01:50:36.000 And when you see it, if you go to the video, it's called Flow Hive. 0.81

01:50:39.000 If you go to the video online, it'll do a much better job of explaining how all this is made, but it's really fucking cool.

01:50:47.000 Right, it's Indiegogo, right?

01:50:48.000 Yeah, but you don't get the bee pollen, and you don't get the actual honeycomb itself, which I like to eat.

01:50:57.000 I love that stuff.

01:50:58.000 Yeah, I mean, the idea is that you're not disturbing the bees, right?

01:51:01.000 You're not really invading their...

01:51:03.000 You're not impeding on their kind of habitat to extract the honey.

01:51:06.000 Does that make honey vegan now?

01:51:07.000 Because honey wasn't vegan for a long time.

01:51:10.000 I mean, look, there are...

01:51:13.000 There is a hardcore, you know, vegan perspective that honey...

01:51:18.000 You know, you shouldn't eat honey.

01:51:19.000 It's an animal product.

01:51:22.000 But it's not.

01:51:23.000 And I respect people that have that opinion.

01:51:25.000 I mean, I think that... 1.00

01:51:27.000 My perspective on it is that our bee populations are threatened because of human beings being fucking idiots. 1.00

01:51:37.000 We've fucked a lot of shit up, right? 1.00

01:51:40.000 Cell phones too, right? 0.99

01:51:41.000 And so I think that You know, our family is trying to be of service by helping foster, you know, the cultivation of bee populations in a, you know, in a sustainable way.

01:51:54.000 Like, by being, by getting involved, you know, there's one school of thought, like, we'll leave it alone, right?

01:52:00.000 But this is a threatened, you know, population that needs a little bit of, you know, graceful intervention in order to help them, you know, foster their population.

01:52:11.000 So to the extent that, you know, I can play a small part in that, I think that's a cool thing.

01:52:16.000 No, I think that's a cool thing as well.

01:52:17.000 And I agree.

01:52:19.000 There's the very hardcore segment of the vegan population that don't think that you should eat honey.

01:52:25.000 But they don't have it like this.

01:52:28.000 Normally, when you get honey, it's like this really complicated process.

01:52:32.000 You have to pull the hives out. 1.00

01:52:34.000 You have to scrape the honey off and extract it in that way.

01:52:40.000 It's totally different.

01:52:41.000 This is a different animal.

01:52:42.000 Yeah, I mean, commercial honey production, you know, there's...

01:53:02.000 I don't know.

01:53:06.000 Again, it gets into splitting hairs.

01:53:09.000 It's like, alright, we're going to talk about this when 55% of CO2 emissions is caused by animal agriculture.

01:53:18.000 We have bigger things.

01:53:21.000 I'm just trying to help bee populations in our tiny little way by educating my kids about it and by being a home to these 40 hives, which is a trip.

01:53:31.000 It's a lot of hives. 0.99

01:53:33.000 40 hives? 0.88

01:53:34.000 How much space is that?

01:53:36.000 I think they stack them four high, so there's ten of those little towers.

01:53:42.000 How tall is the tower?

01:53:43.000 Down the hill, I don't know, three or four feet high.

01:53:46.000 And they brought them in the middle of the night, and it was like, okay, are we going to have swarming bees?

01:53:53.000 Is there going to be like...

01:53:54.000 And we were like, don't go near them for a couple days.

01:53:57.000 Like, let them acclimate.

01:53:58.000 You know, they have to get used to, like, their environment.

01:54:01.000 Wow.

01:54:02.000 I mean, the way the bee populations function is a trip.

01:54:05.000 It's really trippy.

01:54:06.000 They're little aliens.

01:54:07.000 Do you have to plant specific flowers around your area to help them?

01:54:11.000 We haven't had to do that.

01:54:12.000 I mean, the big kind of hurdle that we had to get over was making sure that we had adequate water supply for them.

01:54:17.000 But not that I'm aware of.

01:54:19.000 We have, in our property, we have specific plants and flowers that attract bees and other ones that attract hummingbirds.

01:54:26.000 We have a lot of hummingbirds on our property just because of that. 0.80

01:54:29.000 Because we put certain plants and flowers.

01:54:33.000 But the bees have a real issue, apparently, with cell phones.

01:54:38.000 I was reading this whole thing about how...

01:54:40.000 Oh, the towers, like, impact them?

01:54:42.000 Something like that?

01:54:42.000 The actual signals themselves, they impact the bees' ability to communicate.

01:54:46.000 They fuck with their head. 1.00

01:54:47.000 They can hear that shit. 1.00

01:54:49.000 It wouldn't surprise me. 1.00

01:54:51.000 The way that they literally have the hive mind and the way that they sort of function in that way.

01:54:57.000 The frequency at which they're communicating is so mysterious and amazing.

01:55:03.000 Yeah, it's so cool.

01:55:04.000 I've told this story before, but you might not have heard it.

01:55:07.000 When we were on Fear Factor, one of the stunts they had, they had these people, they had to get handcuffed to a pole or something like that, and then we covered them with bees.

01:55:17.000 And while we're doing this, the beekeeper told us that we had to stop filming because a local population of bees had came over to investigate his population of bees.

01:55:30.000 And they were above us in this cloud in the air sorting it out.

01:55:34.000 They weren't fighting.

01:55:35.000 They were somehow or another communicating. 1.00

01:55:38.000 Like, who the fuck are you guys? 1.00

01:55:39.000 Oh man, we're here for a TV show. 0.99

01:55:41.000 Okay, so you're not moving in.

01:55:42.000 No, we're not moving in.

01:55:43.000 Are you guys taking our pollen?

01:55:45.000 No, we're not.

01:55:46.000 Taking your pollen, like, and they had to work it out.

01:55:49.000 And then they worked it out.

01:55:49.000 They worked it out.

01:55:50.000 They disappeared.

01:55:51.000 Yeah, and then we kept filming.

01:55:52.000 But it took, we had to stop.

01:55:54.000 So amazing.

01:55:54.000 It was really cool.

01:55:55.000 It was really cool to watch, because it was like, what is going on?

01:55:58.000 And I, you know, and I, everybody was, it was weird how people weren't interested in it.

01:56:03.000 Because they're like, oh, we got to stop filming.

01:56:05.000 Apparently, like, there's a local bee population that's intermixed with this bee population.

01:56:09.000 I was like, what? 0.99

01:56:09.000 First of all, I was high as fuck. 0.99

01:56:11.000 So it was super, super interesting to me. 0.99

01:56:14.000 So I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

01:56:15.000 They're talking?

01:56:16.000 Like, how do you know whose bees are whose bees?

01:56:18.000 He goes, and he was like, you could tell just by the way they're swarming in the air.

01:56:22.000 They're trying to work this out.

01:56:24.000 And so there was this, like, small cloud of these bees, because he had brought a lot of bees.

01:56:29.000 And the local bees got together with his bees, and they were hovering.

01:56:33.000 But they had to disperse.

01:56:35.000 Like, they told everyone to get away.

01:56:37.000 They told the crew to get away.

01:56:39.000 Everyone leave the area.

01:56:41.000 You know, he wanted to make sure that there was nothing fucking with this interaction, this strange...

01:56:45.000 Right. 0.88

01:56:45.000 Because he has... 0.88

01:56:46.000 You have, like, the bee whisperer guy.

01:56:48.000 Yeah, well, he's a deep respect for bees.

01:56:50.000 This guy really does love bees.

01:56:51.000 It was really, really interesting.

01:56:53.000 It was interesting for me, too, because I was covered with bees in that episode.

01:56:56.000 I mean, they were all over my hair and my face and my arms and everything like that.

01:57:00.000 And I never got stung.

01:57:02.000 A couple people got stung on the set, but I don't know what happened. 0.99

01:57:06.000 It could have been maybe if a bee's in your armpit and you move your arm and it gets trapped, and it's like, fuck this, and it stings you. 0.93

01:57:14.000 Probably just accidental circumstances that came from having millions or thousands or whatever it was, a bee. 0.99

01:57:19.000 Right, right, right.

01:57:21.000 That's pretty interesting.

01:57:21.000 Yeah, it was really cool.

01:57:23.000 It was really cool seeing them all get together and try to figure it out.

01:57:27.000 Just flying overhead, just communicating in some way that we just really don't even have a clue.

01:57:34.000 We believe pheromones are involved, but we also know that there's some sort of signal that they're sending out.

01:57:40.000 We just don't know what it is, you know?

01:57:42.000 The whole insect world is a real trip.

01:57:45.000 I mean, they really are alien.

01:57:47.000 They really are some strange alien life form.

01:57:50.000 We found them on another planet, we'd be blown away.

01:57:53.000 Yeah.

01:57:54.000 I mean, you know, just the idea that there's a queen, and the fact that the hive is lost without it, and that everything kind of falls into place when the queen is, you know, inserted into the population. 0.99

01:58:09.000 I mean, I can't begin to, you know, it's like, I know very little about How about the Queen's a murdering bitch? 1.00

01:58:15.000 She's got a fucking stinger that doesn't come off. 1.00

01:58:17.000 She doesn't have like barbs on it the way everyone else does. 1.00

01:58:20.000 And what she does is she wanders around the hive looking for female babies and she stabs them right through the fucking honeycomb. 1.00

01:58:27.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:58:28.000 That's what the female uses her stinger for. 1.00

01:58:30.000 It's like Game of Thrones.

01:58:30.000 Oh, it's awful.

01:58:31.000 She's a fucking heartless cunt. 1.00

01:58:33.000 And, you know, one day she will be usurped. 1.00

01:58:36.000 A new female will come along and kick her ass, and that's it. 1.00

01:58:40.000 But right now, she's going to stab those babies. 1.00

01:58:43.000 So she runs around, like, sticking her needle in the honeycomb when she smells a female. 1.00

01:58:48.000 There's a fucking girl in there who wants to come and take my spot. 1.00

01:58:53.000 No threat to the throne. 1.00

01:58:55.000 Yeah, it's a very bizarre world of bugs.

01:58:58.000 Have you ever seen the leafcutter ant documentary they did where they cemented, they poured cement through this leafcutter ant hive, this enormous...

01:59:14.000 Oh, I think I did see this.

01:59:16.000 Yeah, it was incredibly labyrinthine, right?

01:59:19.000 And it was vast.

01:59:21.000 Vast.

01:59:21.000 It was huge.

01:59:22.000 Yeah, huge and incredibly complex.

01:59:25.000 Like, they had areas where these leaves would ferment, and then they had pipes that led, like tubes, that led through to the sky or to the surface area where they would hit air so that the fermentation process,

01:59:40.000 the gases, could be released.

01:59:42.000 Yeah, that's crazy.

01:59:43.000 Like, with these tiny brains. 1.00

01:59:45.000 How the fuck are they figuring that out? 1.00

01:59:47.000 Like, we don't even know. 1.00

01:59:48.000 Well, human beings would fuck that up in an instant. 0.99

01:59:50.000 For sure! 0.98

01:59:51.000 You know?

01:59:52.000 Unions would get involved, and there it is!

01:59:54.000 Look at that!

01:59:55.000 Oh my god!

01:59:55.000 Yeah, I did see this.

01:59:57.000 Industry in the rainforest.

01:59:58.000 Right.

01:59:59.000 It's like they did an archaeological dig to, like, extract it, right?

02:00:02.000 Yeah, they filled it up with cement, and I mean, first of all, it's enormous.

02:00:07.000 You look at how wide it is, it's probably 50 feet wide.

02:00:11.000 It's insane.

02:00:12.000 It's very deep as well.

02:00:14.000 And there's so much to it.

02:00:16.000 There's so much going on there.

02:00:18.000 And how are they communicating?

02:00:21.000 Who is the architect of all this structure?

02:00:24.000 How did they figure this out?

02:00:26.000 They all know how to do this? 1.00

02:00:29.000 Like, what in the fuck, man? 1.00

02:00:33.000 Unbelievable. 1.00

02:00:33.000 Unbelievable and a huge fucking mystery. 1.00

02:00:37.000 Until a decade or two ago, we had no idea what the fuck was even below the surface. 0.99

02:00:42.000 We had no idea what they were doing down there. 0.94

02:00:44.000 I mean, it really is amazing.

02:00:47.000 It is just absolutely amazing.

02:00:51.000 Have you seen the ant death spiral?

02:00:52.000 Have you ever seen that?

02:00:53.000 No.

02:00:54.000 Whoa, that's a trip.

02:00:55.000 Check this out.

02:00:55.000 You're like king of the obscure animal video.

02:00:58.000 So I do my free time, man.

02:01:00.000 I love to watch animal nature videos.

02:01:03.000 I think it's very underappreciated, the...

02:01:15.000 What is that crazy rodent that looks like a...

02:01:21.000 Capybara?

02:01:22.000 Yeah.

02:01:22.000 Do you see that one where they're climbing into a hot tub?

02:01:25.000 They have like this hot tub party.

02:01:27.000 There's an animal, there's an ant death spiral.

02:01:30.000 This is an ant death spiral and this is when the queen dies. 0.99

02:01:34.000 When a queen dies and the scent is no longer there, they don't know who to follow, they don't know what the fuck to do, and they go into this spiral and they will just do this until they run out of energy and food and they will fucking die. 0.98

02:01:49.000 I mean, I'm probably doing a really shitty job of explaining this. 0.99

02:01:52.000 They'll just continue to spin like that until they just perish. 0.69

02:01:56.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:01:57.000 They don't know where to go.

02:01:58.000 They don't know who to follow.

02:01:59.000 I mean, there's a hierarchy in the ant community.

02:02:02.000 I'm sure it could be explained.

02:02:04.000 See if you can find an explanation for it, Jamie.

02:02:07.000 I probably butchered it but the the idea being that they're following the scent of the Queen and somehow or another lose it and so they don't know what to do so they just start going in the spiral maybe someone stepped on the Queen or something happened they remove the Queen perhaps and a bird might have stolen the Queen mmm like a dragon come down swoop take away their Queen yeah world's crazy mysterious place Well,

02:02:31.000 insects in particular, we don't think of them that much because they're so small, but ants have the almost exact same calculated biomass as human beings when it comes to weight, meaning that there's exactly the same amount of weight for the bodies of ants on Earth as there are humans.

02:02:51.000 Oh, you mean in total?

02:02:54.000 In total, yes.

02:02:54.000 Like if you added up all the ants and all the humans, the total mass would be the equal?

02:02:59.000 Mm-hmm.

02:03:00.000 Yeah, that's crazy. 1.00

02:03:00.000 Fuck. 1.00

02:03:02.000 That's how many ants there are. 1.00

02:03:04.000 How many fucking ants does it take to equal a 180-pound person? 0.99

02:03:09.000 It's got to be a lot. 0.99

02:03:11.000 What's the average height or weight of a person?

02:03:13.000 It's probably somewhere around there, like 160 or something like that, between men and women.

02:03:17.000 Not in the U.S. Yeah, it's like 100 pounds more than that, right?

02:03:21.000 The average...

02:03:22.000 How to make ants commit suicide would go into a spiral.

02:03:26.000 Yeah.

02:03:27.000 You can make them do it? 1.00

02:03:28.000 Why would you do that, dick? 0.99

02:03:30.000 Yeah, that's totally not cool. 0.99

02:03:32.000 You simply divert the ants into an enclosed space such as a plant pot.

02:03:35.000 The largest ant mill ever discovered was staggering 1,200 feet in diameter with each ant completing a circuit every two and a half hours. 0.99

02:03:44.000 Holy shit! 1.00

02:03:46.000 Whoa! 1.00

02:03:48.000 So you can make them do it?

02:03:50.000 That unable to break free, owing to their lack of sight, and they march around in a loop until they drop dead.

02:03:56.000 What does it say before that?

02:03:58.000 It explains it.

02:03:58.000 How do they remove the...

02:04:00.000 Army ants navigate by following the pheromone trails left behind by others.

02:04:04.000 However, should enough of them lose the scent, they begin to follow the ant immediately in front of them in a huge ant spiral forms.

02:04:11.000 Ah.

02:04:12.000 Whoa.

02:04:13.000 Whoa.

02:04:14.000 They follow the scent of those in front of them. 1.00

02:04:17.000 That's a fucking trip, man. 1.00

02:04:19.000 How weird. 0.99

02:04:21.000 It's weird that not only did nature somehow or another have a need for this, but it came about, it developed, and it's been the same way, that way, for who knows how many millions of years.

02:04:37.000 What is the evolutionary purpose of that, though?

02:04:41.000 They follow each other. 1.00

02:04:42.000 They can't see shit. 1.00

02:04:44.000 But who the fuck is the first guy? 1.00

02:04:46.000 What does he know? 0.99

02:04:48.000 How does he know what he's doing?

02:04:49.000 You're going deep, Joe.

02:04:51.000 Cutting up leaves and making these fermentation bowls in the ground. 1.00

02:04:58.000 Trippy fucking world the insect world is. 0.99

02:05:00.000 The insect world to me is one of the most bizarre worlds. 1.00

02:05:04.000 Or the, you know, most overlooked.

02:05:06.000 Because they're so small, we don't think of them as alien as they truly are.

02:05:10.000 You know, if an ant was the size of a dog, it would freak you the fuck out.

02:05:14.000 I mean, it's downright prehistoric.

02:05:16.000 Yeah.

02:05:16.000 Oh, beyond.

02:05:17.000 Yeah.

02:05:17.000 I mean, they're prehistoric even to dinosaurs.

02:05:20.000 Dinosaurs looking ants and what the fuck is that? 0.99

02:05:23.000 Crazy thing with an exoskeleton with unbelievable physical strength. 0.99

02:05:27.000 I mean, the physical strength that an ant has...

02:05:29.000 Yeah, the power to weight ratio is pretty off the charts.

02:05:32.000 Oh, it's incredible.

02:05:33.000 Incredible.

02:05:34.000 Have you ever seen ants carry large things away? 0.99

02:05:36.000 Just, what the fuck, man? 0.99

02:05:39.000 The ant world is a ruthless, evil, vicious world, too. 1.00

02:05:43.000 You ever see when the female ants get a hold of... 1.00

02:05:47.000 I think it's leafcutters as well.

02:05:48.000 They get a hold of a male. 0.59

02:05:49.000 Males are larger and they have wings.

02:05:51.000 Might not be leafcutters, but whatever it is, they chop the wings off of the male, chop his arms off and legs, and then carry him to the hive to breed. 0.65

02:05:59.000 I haven't seen that. 0.99

02:06:01.000 Bitches. 1.00

02:06:01.000 So rude. 1.00

02:06:02.000 I gotta bone up on my nature videos, I think.

02:06:06.000 Yeah, I probably have to bone down.

02:06:09.000 I probably have too many of them in there. 0.87

02:06:10.000 Too much useless information.

02:06:12.000 I don't have the time, Joe.

02:06:13.000 I don't know.

02:06:14.000 I don't know where it comes from.

02:06:16.000 I just, I get compelled to research things and to follow up and to start reading and watching things.

02:06:22.000 And the next thing you know, I've gone on this crazy cycle.

02:06:26.000 Is that a...

02:06:27.000 Yeah.

02:06:28.000 What kind of ants it is?

02:06:29.000 The biggest ants.

02:06:32.000 Two and a half inches. 0.50

02:06:34.000 That's a big-ass ant. 0.99

02:06:35.000 Well, have you ever seen...

02:06:36.000 Ant with wings.

02:06:37.000 My friend, Brian Cowan, at one point in time was studying to be an ant scientist.

02:06:44.000 And he would spend some time in rainforests.

02:06:47.000 I think it was...

02:06:48.000 Borneo?

02:06:48.000 New Guinea?

02:06:50.000 I forget what it was.

02:06:51.000 But they had to, everyone stayed in these tents, these elevated platforms.

02:06:56.000 They had to coat the posts with turpentine.

02:06:59.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:07:00.000 Because there were so many ants, and if the army ants found you, if they found you and one of them decided to bite you, just like they follow the scent, then millions and millions and millions and they would just eat you alive.

02:07:11.000 And people would regularly get killed by ants there.

02:07:15.000 That's crazy.

02:07:16.000 How about the fact they kill elephants? 1.00

02:07:18.000 They climb up the elephant's leg, they find the ear, and they start eating the fucking elephant's brain. 1.00

02:07:24.000 And then they all follow the scent, and they all go up the elephant's body and eat his fucking brain alive. 1.00

02:07:31.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:07:33.000 From the inside out.

02:07:35.000 Ants kill a lot of things.

02:07:37.000 You wouldn't think so.

02:07:38.000 Well, all you have to do is leave, like, something out on your kitchen counter for five minutes.

02:07:43.000 Yeah.

02:07:44.000 And out of mysterious nowhere, a line of ants will appear.

02:07:47.000 Yeah.

02:07:48.000 Or flies.

02:07:48.000 And then if you remove it, they disappear.

02:07:51.000 Well, have you ever seen something outside that, like, wasn't there before, and then all of a sudden the flies find it?

02:07:56.000 And then within minutes... 0.99

02:07:58.000 There's all these fucking flies. 0.99

02:08:00.000 There was no flies. 0.99

02:08:01.000 And then within minutes, they find this, and somehow or another they go, yo, yo, yo, here we go!

02:08:06.000 We got something! 0.99

02:08:07.000 And then there's all these fucking flies. 0.99

02:08:09.000 It's very, like, how are they doing that? 0.99

02:08:11.000 Like, we don't even know.

02:08:12.000 We have no idea.

02:08:14.000 I don't know.

02:08:15.000 We got diverted.

02:08:16.000 I know.

02:08:17.000 You need an insectologist.

02:08:19.000 Is that what they would be called?

02:08:20.000 Nope.

02:08:20.000 Some sort of a word for that.

02:08:22.000 What is it?

02:08:24.000 Entomologist?

02:08:25.000 Entomologist, that's right.

02:08:25.000 Is that what it is?

02:08:26.000 Yeah.

02:08:27.000 What's the study of words, the origins of words?

02:08:30.000 Etymology?

02:08:30.000 Etymology.

02:08:31.000 Etymology.

02:08:32.000 Don't get confused.

02:08:35.000 Order one and get the other. 1.00

02:08:36.000 I'm trying to find out the origin of the word cunt. 0.98

02:08:39.000 Well, I know about bugs. 0.97

02:08:42.000 There's a lot of layers to that, Brian Callan.

02:08:44.000 What compelled him to want to study that?

02:08:46.000 I don't know.

02:08:47.000 There's a lot of layers to Brian.

02:08:49.000 Yeah, Brian's a deep dude.

02:08:51.000 You know, you start getting to know him, you dig deeper and deeper and deeper. 0.98

02:08:54.000 You find out his educational background, and he knows a lot of shit about weird stuff. 0.93

02:09:00.000 You know? 0.97

02:09:00.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.97

02:09:01.000 But that freaked him out.

02:09:03.000 He said he could hear them marching in the ants.

02:09:05.000 You hear them walking at night.

02:09:08.000 Yeah, it's crazy.

02:09:09.000 So many of them on the floor that you just, you realize like, oh my god, there's millions of them.

02:09:15.000 You were talking about how you're a huge Radiolab fan, right?

02:09:19.000 Yes.

02:09:19.000 Have you gotten down with the show Invisibilia?

02:09:22.000 No, what is that?

02:09:23.000 Oh, it's pretty cool, man.

02:09:24.000 I think you would dig it.

02:09:25.000 Is that a different podcast?

02:09:27.000 Yeah, it's a different podcast.

02:09:28.000 It's another one of those Invisibilia.

02:09:31.000 It's another kind of NPR offshoot, you know, like how sort of Ira Glass at This American Life, all these producers that have worked for him have now started all these other podcasts.

02:09:41.000 Super interesting stories.

02:09:42.000 There was one recently about a guy.

02:09:46.000 Who I guess is a pretty well-known guy.

02:09:49.000 He's blind.

02:09:50.000 I think he went blind as a four-year-old or something like that.

02:09:53.000 He lost his sight.

02:09:56.000 In school, he started making these clicking noises with his mouth.

02:10:02.000 Like...

02:10:03.000 Like that.

02:10:04.000 And his teachers would say, you know, what are you doing?

02:10:06.000 Settle down.

02:10:07.000 Stop doing that.

02:10:08.000 And his mother realized very early on that there was some purpose to this.

02:10:13.000 There was some reason why he was doing this.

02:10:15.000 Echo location?

02:10:15.000 Yeah.

02:10:16.000 And what they realized is that he was developing over many years of practicing this like a finely attuned sonar ability.

02:10:25.000 Like he would literally be able to...

02:10:29.000 Figure out where he was and what was in a room and what was going on by basically making these clicking noises and the sound waves bouncing off.

02:10:37.000 And he developed this acuity to be able to discern from that the parameters of his environment to the extent that he goes running, he rides a bike.

02:10:50.000 What?

02:10:50.000 It's insane what this guy has been able to do as a blind person.

02:10:53.000 He goes running?

02:10:54.000 And his whole thing is...

02:10:58.000 Is that he doesn't think that he's anything special.

02:11:01.000 He thinks that all blind people could develop this skill, but that our education around blindness is sort of a vernacular of disability, right?

02:11:14.000 Where we say, well, you're disabled, you can't do this, so we're going to put you into this system, and this is how we do it with blind people. 1.00

02:11:20.000 And he's like, that's bullshit. 0.99

02:11:22.000 Like, everybody could learn to do what I'm doing. 0.99

02:11:24.000 We need to, like, empower blind people in this way.

02:11:28.000 It's super interesting.

02:11:29.000 It's like a long interview with this guy.

02:11:30.000 But anyway, each week they have some kind of interesting story like that.

02:11:33.000 Well, there's a video of a young kid who can do that.

02:11:35.000 A young kid who walks on the street, makes clicking noises, and he knows where trash cans are and stuff.

02:11:41.000 That's crazy, right?

02:11:42.000 Yeah.

02:11:43.000 So like the latent abilities that we all have, right?

02:11:47.000 If we develop them, it's sort of like how the disability unlocks some other aspect of your brain that needs to develop in order to survive.

02:11:55.000 One of the best pool players in the world is this young man named Shane Van Boning, and he's deaf.

02:12:00.000 He's been deaf since birth.

02:12:01.000 And when he plays, he shuts his hearing aid off.

02:12:03.000 And it allows him to concentrate more.

02:12:05.000 Yeah, here's this guy.

02:12:06.000 Look at this.

02:12:07.000 Oh, that's the guy.

02:12:08.000 That's him.

02:12:09.000 This is a different guy than the other guy was a young black guy.

02:12:12.000 Right.

02:12:12.000 So this is the guy from the podcast.

02:12:14.000 So is he clicking?

02:12:18.000 He doesn't even have eyes, save for prosthetic ones.

02:12:21.000 Daniel has never seen a tree, a car, or even the bicycle he's riding.

02:12:27.000 So, how does he know where he's going?

02:12:29.000 He's literally driving down the street.

02:12:31.000 The answer can be found in the clicking sound you hear.

02:12:35.000 It's called echolocation.

02:12:37.000 Bats use it to fly around in the dark, and dolphins use it to navigate the oceans.

02:12:43.000 Daniel uses echolocation, or sound, to see.

02:12:47.000 Every environment has its own acoustical signature.

02:12:50.000 Every surface has its own acoustical signature.

02:12:53.000 Daniel was born with an aggressive form of eye cancer called retinal blastoma.

02:12:58.000 By the time he was 13 months old, both of his eyes were removed.

02:13:03.000 You're 45. So you lost your sight at such a young age.

02:13:08.000 You don't have any memory of vision.

02:13:12.000 I have no memories at all.

02:13:13.000 I was using echolocation from the age of two or younger, but I really didn't know that much about it.

02:13:18.000 It was just how you adapted to your environment without really understanding it?

02:13:22.000 Yes, I doubt very seriously that most sighted people give much thought or attention about how they see.

02:13:29.000 So, I really didn't give much thought or attention about how I see.

02:13:32.000 Daniel uses echolocation to ride his bike.

02:13:38.000 Is this a dish that you normally cook, Daniel, or are you experimenting with me?

02:13:43.000 This is a total experiment.

02:13:47.000 And even hike alone in the mountains.

02:13:51.000 Using sound to see can be a hard concept for a sighted person to understand. 1.00

02:13:56.000 What the fuck? 0.99

02:13:57.000 But Daniel will tell you he sees his environment as a series of images created in his mind based on what he hears using echolocation. 1.00

02:14:06.000 So you're calling out into the environment.

02:14:08.000 You're essentially asking the environment what are you and where are you and you're receiving those answers.

02:14:15.000 So you're getting an image in your mind.

02:14:17.000 Yes, I definitely get Three-dimensional images with depth and character and richness.

02:14:27.000 And I can process those and I can interact with those.

02:14:32.000 From his modest bungalow in Long Beach, Daniel runs a small non-profit called World Access for the Blind.

02:14:39.000 Since being established in 2000, World Access has been the lone voice preaching echolocation.

02:14:46.000 In fact, every major blind organization in America does not support Daniel's mission.

02:14:52.000 So, Daniel, the National Federation of the Blind will say that echolocation is just too complicated for most blind people to grasp.

02:15:03.000 It's not so much the Federation that's a concern.

02:15:07.000 You have here a blindness profession, the blindness field, who by and large really kind of intractably remains We're committed, if you will, to a traditional approach which is about,

02:15:25.000 in my opinion, restriction.

02:15:28.000 It is about, this is how you do things.

02:15:31.000 This is the right way for a blind person to do things. 1.00

02:15:33.000 This is safe.

02:15:35.000 This isn't safe. 1.00

02:15:38.000 Watching that guy drive his bike is a fucking trip. 0.99

02:15:41.000 That is bizarre. 1.00

02:15:43.000 Right.

02:15:44.000 And so you watch that, and it makes you just think about human capability in a different way.

02:15:50.000 Well, it certainly does.

02:15:51.000 It certainly makes you wonder, like, what...

02:15:55.000 What else we could do?

02:15:57.000 You know, if we could figure that out, if there's a person like him that can figure out how to see things with his sound, making echolocations, what other possible senses could be developed to that extent,

02:16:15.000 you know?

02:16:17.000 Well, in the animal kingdom, aren't they training these German shepherds that can smell cancer, like early onset of cancer? 0.54

02:16:25.000 They're doing similar things with rats.

02:16:29.000 I mean, obviously those animals have a more developed sense in that area, but to the extent that human beings have unlocked potential in areas that we haven't really looked at, I think it's pretty interesting.

02:16:42.000 Well, people certainly have finely developed senses, like certain people that play instruments have finely developed senses of sound.

02:16:50.000 Sommeliers have a finely developed sense of taste.

02:16:52.000 Have you ever talked to someone who's like a real wine sommelier and they can drink a glass of wine, have a sip of it, and tell you what part of the world it came from?

02:17:02.000 That's real. 0.99

02:17:03.000 I mean, they can sip it and tell you what part of France they're growing these fucking grapes. 0.99

02:17:09.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:17:09.000 Well, there are these people with crazy noses that work in the perfume industry that are highly paid to, you know, decipher these accents. 0.99

02:17:19.000 Yeah.

02:17:19.000 It's like something I couldn't even relate to.

02:17:22.000 But I think in general, you know...

02:17:25.000 Need is the mother of that invention. 0.89

02:17:27.000 Like, you know, somebody who's not in Daniel's condition is not on their own going to develop echolocation.

02:17:32.000 Right.

02:17:33.000 You know what I mean?

02:17:34.000 It also makes you really wonder if there are fields, like we were talking about how bees can tune into the sound that a cell phone makes and it fucks with them.

02:17:43.000 I wonder if there's anything like that that's affecting us in some sort of a strange way that we're not aware of.

02:17:49.000 Because one of the things that I'm always really aware of when I go If I go to the wilderness, if I go to a real wild place, is the sound of it is different than the sound of silence here.

02:18:03.000 Like, if you're in a park here and it's beautiful and it's nature, it's nice, it's relaxing, but there's a certain tone to, like, Prince of Wales Island in Alaska is a perfect example.

02:18:13.000 We were there and we were on the top of this mountain.

02:18:16.000 We're sitting there and I was like, Do you hear that?

02:18:19.000 It sounds different.

02:18:21.000 It feels different here.

02:18:22.000 It's like you're getting a signal of no signal.

02:18:26.000 There's no cell phone.

02:18:27.000 There's no radio.

02:18:28.000 You're not tuning into anything other than nature itself.

02:18:32.000 And it has a different tone to it than a city has.

02:18:36.000 Well, for sure.

02:18:37.000 I mean, I would say that you're saying there's no signal, but I think there's probably a really powerful signal.

02:18:42.000 It's just a different signal.

02:18:43.000 Yeah, I shouldn't say no is the wrong way to say it.

02:18:45.000 Yeah.

02:18:46.000 You know, listen, everything is vibration and energy.

02:18:49.000 And, you know, if you don't think that, you know, that isn't real, you know, go hang out with negative people for a week and see how you start behaving.

02:18:58.000 So true.

02:18:59.000 You know, an environment is no different.

02:19:02.000 And we tend to believe that if we can't see something, that it's not real.

02:19:06.000 Here's, you know, Daniel, who, you know, is putting out sound waves into the world, and he's able to figure out what his environment is.

02:19:16.000 You can't see that.

02:19:17.000 He can't see that.

02:19:18.000 But to him, it's very real.

02:19:20.000 And, you know, we're surrounded by all kinds of crazy, invisible energies and waves, from cell phone towers to Wi-Fi signals and all this kind of stuff.

02:19:30.000 I mean, do we know how this is impacting us?

02:19:37.000 To Wi-Fi and cell phones like they get headaches and all kinds of stuff.

02:19:42.000 What is this Jamie?

02:19:43.000 Student science experiment finds plants won't grow near Wi-Fi router?

02:19:47.000 Some ninth graders in Denmark Did a test where they put, what they said was, or they tested, it's the same radiation a cell phone gives off, so they put some watercress, I think is what it's called, or gardencress, and six trays in one room, six trays in another, with two Wi-Fi routers,

02:20:03.000 and essentially, as you can see in the picture, didn't grow.

02:20:07.000 So the ones in the Wi-Fi routers is no different in the environment other than the fact that Wi-Fi routers were there?

02:20:12.000 Yeah.

02:20:13.000 Yeah, that ain't good.

02:20:14.000 That's frightening.

02:20:15.000 It is.

02:20:15.000 12 days of growth.

02:20:17.000 Then it totally makes sense.

02:20:18.000 I mean, there's a signal.

02:20:19.000 If your phone can pick up that signal, there's something in the air.

02:20:23.000 And that something in the air is probably disruptive to other things that are also in the air.

02:20:28.000 Mm-hmm. 0.73

02:20:30.000 If it's fucking up the bees, what's it doing to your brain? 0.94

02:20:33.000 Exactly, right?

02:20:35.000 It feels different, man.

02:20:37.000 When you go to a place with no cell phone signal, it literally feels different.

02:20:40.000 And it's so rare that we do that.

02:20:42.000 So rare.

02:20:43.000 Yeah, but it's not just the cell phone signal.

02:20:46.000 I mean, it's all kinds of things.

02:20:48.000 Yeah, people give off a certain signal, too.

02:20:51.000 You know, people want to think that that's hippie and woo-woo, but man, when you're around really negative people, they're just, oh, I've got to get away from this person.

02:20:58.000 And it's not just you've got to get away from them because they say certain things.

02:21:02.000 Like, they give off a vibe.

02:21:04.000 You know, that's a hippie thing to say, the vibes.

02:21:08.000 Guys give me a bad vibe, man.

02:21:10.000 But I think it's real.

02:21:12.000 I think there are certain signals.

02:21:14.000 You walk into a room and you're like, well, there's a heavy energy in here.

02:21:17.000 There's something weird, doesn't feel right to me.

02:21:20.000 Yeah, I got you get you get you get like anxious and you got to leave.

02:21:24.000 Yeah, right?

02:21:25.000 Everybody's had that experience.

02:21:27.000 Well, that's why nobody wants to buy a house where someone was killed in it, right?

02:21:32.000 I mean, the house is awesome.

02:21:34.000 You find out this there was like a double homicide. 1.00

02:21:36.000 They're like fuck this place. 0.99

02:21:37.000 Have you ever been up in Towards see me that like dry lake bed in Chatsworth and Yes. 0.99

02:21:46.000 What's that canyon called right there that's creepy?

02:21:51.000 Topo?

02:21:52.000 No, what is it?

02:21:52.000 No, no, no.

02:21:54.000 I don't know.

02:21:55.000 You know what I'm talking about, though?

02:21:56.000 I know what you're talking about, though.

02:21:56.000 I ride my bike.

02:21:58.000 I do a lot of training around here, and I've ridden up that canyon.

02:22:01.000 It's a great climb, but there's something weird.

02:22:03.000 You can feel a weird energy, and it turns out that...

02:22:08.000 Box Canyon?

02:22:08.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:22:09.000 Box Canyon.

02:22:10.000 And like, what's that?

02:22:12.000 The Manson family.

02:22:13.000 Yeah, there was like the Mansons were back there.

02:22:15.000 And also there are, I think it's Boeing is back there.

02:22:18.000 Yes.

02:22:19.000 Defense contractors where they were doing like nuclear testing in the ground, which is why that's a dry lake bed.

02:22:24.000 And there's still some people that will tell you that they're, you know, it's like, it's not so safe there. 0.99

02:22:29.000 They did some shit out there, you know? 1.00

02:22:31.000 Well, they definitely did some shit there. 1.00

02:22:32.000 Not only that, there was some, in CME, there were some water well tests that they did that found traces of rocket fuel in the water well. 0.99

02:22:41.000 And there's a cleanup that's going on up there right now.

02:22:43.000 Is it really?

02:22:44.000 Yeah.

02:22:45.000 Santa Susana Pass.

02:22:47.000 People are worried about that cleanup because what they're worried about is that if they start digging and cleaning up, that the dust is going to get into the air and it's going to blow through the valley.

02:22:57.000 And whatever trace elements of that rocket fuel.

02:23:00.000 Apparently there was a lot of disasters up there. 0.98

02:23:02.000 They did a lot of shit down there in the 50s and the 60s. 0.96

02:23:05.000 A lot of early testing on stuff. 0.98

02:23:07.000 Yeah, they had some sort of a nuclear thing there as well.

02:23:11.000 Apparently, there was a nuclear incident much worse than Three Mile Island.

02:23:17.000 Really?

02:23:19.000 In 1959, they had something worse than Three Mile Island.

02:23:23.000 Huh.

02:23:23.000 I read a study on it, though, and one of the things that said the study, like, the half-life of the type of radiation that they had was very short-lived, so it's not something that, like, lingers in an area.

02:23:35.000 The real concern that the, apparently...

02:23:38.000 According to what I read, that the sober environmentalists are concerned with is the rocket fuel that's leaked into the ground and gotten into the well water in that area.

02:23:48.000 That's the real concern.

02:23:49.000 Is that why the lake bed is dry?

02:23:51.000 I don't know.

02:23:52.000 I have no idea why the lake bed is dry.

02:23:54.000 Interesting.

02:23:54.000 I knew a dude who lived near a golf course and the pesticides from the golf course leaked into the well and he got cancer, his neighbor got cancer, kids in his neighbor, like all throughout their neighborhood people got cancer and they got cancer because of the pesticides.

02:24:12.000 Like they all got a very specific type of bone cancer. 0.97

02:24:16.000 Scary shit, like he doesn't have a femur. 0.99

02:24:18.000 One of his femurs is like a metal rod that they replaced his femur with because he had cancer. 1.00

02:24:22.000 That's crazy.

02:24:23.000 Yeah.

02:24:24.000 And it's from pesticides.

02:24:25.000 I hope there was a big class action.

02:24:27.000 Yeah, I don't know. 0.98

02:24:28.000 I don't know what the fuck went down, but, you know, bone cancer from a golf course. 1.00

02:24:34.000 Fuck. 1.00

02:24:35.000 You know? 1.00

02:24:36.000 Imagine what a rocket facility was.

02:24:39.000 They're dumping... 1.00

02:24:40.000 What kind of shit they're dumping into that fucking ground over there? 1.00

02:24:42.000 Yeah, no kidding, right? 1.00

02:24:43.000 I mean, you know, our world is getting more and more toxic, right?

02:24:46.000 All these things we have to worry about and think about.

02:24:48.000 Think about, you know, you just look on the back of, you know, the average packaged food that you pick up at the grocery store and all the ingredients in it.

02:24:55.000 And like, you know, who knows what all that stuff is and whether it's safe.

02:24:58.000 And we're entrusting...

02:25:00.000 Regulatory bodies to make these decisions for us, right?

02:25:03.000 How about medication?

02:25:04.000 Yeah, of course, right?

02:25:05.000 All the new medications are constantly coming out, side effects?

02:25:08.000 Well, I mean, the commercials are just comedic, you know, like literally way more, you know, disclosures about side effects than actual product information.

02:25:18.000 Yeah, we played one for acne medicine the other day that was hilarious.

02:25:22.000 Because there was this like...

02:25:23.000 Suicidal ideation.

02:25:24.000 Yeah, not just suicidal.

02:25:25.000 They were talking about bloody diarrhea.

02:25:27.000 They had these really pretty girls and they were walking down the street. 0.87

02:25:30.000 They were bopping.

02:25:31.000 One of the girls from that commercial, the red-headed girl, contacted me on Twitter. 1.00

02:25:35.000 They had no idea what the fuck they were selling. 0.99

02:25:37.000 You know, they're just trying to be pretty. 0.99

02:25:38.000 You know, they're not talking in the commercial, but they're bopping down the street to that Pharrell song, Happy.

02:25:44.000 And they have, like, beautiful skin and beautiful hair and their perfect bone structure.

02:25:49.000 And they literally, like, bopping as they're walking, like they're in some, like, happy music video.

02:25:53.000 And then as they're doing that, they start reading the laundry list of possible potential side effects that are fatal.

02:26:01.000 Bloody diarrhea, stomach cramps, all these different things.

02:26:04.000 And then they're very specific, which could be fatal.

02:26:07.000 Just because you're getting zits.

02:26:09.000 And again, like you were saying, like looking at the...

02:26:11.000 We're on the couch watching this.

02:26:13.000 I mean, we've signed up for this.

02:26:14.000 I mean, the Orwellian dystopia is like weirder than you could have ever imagined.

02:26:20.000 Right.

02:26:20.000 And again, what you were talking about earlier is you're using a medication to deal with an issue that if you take a holistic approach, what's causing you to have acne?

02:26:31.000 What is causing your skin to break out in some sort of a horrible way that you need this fucking bloody diarrhea inducing medication to combat it? 0.80

02:26:40.000 Yeah, I mean, at some point, you know, the side effects far outweigh, you know, the condition that you're trying to treat. 0.99

02:26:47.000 I would say zits to bloody diarrhea that kills you.

02:26:50.000 There isn't even a single thought put into the cause. 0.95

02:26:54.000 Like, why don't we talk about what might be leading to this and maybe some choices that you could make that could alleviate or prevent this.

02:27:02.000 No, just take this.

02:27:04.000 Well, you can't make any money with those choices. 0.99

02:27:07.000 Enjoy your bloody diarrhea. 0.98

02:27:08.000 There's only one way to make the money. 0.98

02:27:10.000 The way you make the money is you've got to sell the stuff.

02:27:15.000 You don't make money by getting people.

02:27:18.000 You can.

02:27:18.000 You can write a book.

02:27:20.000 A book will make some money.

02:27:22.000 It's not going to make as much money as Accutane or something like that.

02:27:25.000 I know.

02:27:26.000 The broccoli growers need to unite.

02:27:29.000 Yeah, imagine if there was like a plant that cured zits, just one plant.

02:27:33.000 Boy, would they make that plant illegal quick.

02:27:37.000 Croaching on Pfizer's profits or something.

02:27:41.000 Yeah, all that money.

02:27:42.000 What is that stuff?

02:27:43.000 The benzoyl peroxide, the stuff?

02:27:44.000 All that money?

02:27:45.000 Oh, yeah. 1.00

02:27:46.000 All that does is dries your fucking skin out. 1.00

02:27:49.000 That's what it does. 1.00

02:27:50.000 All the pus gets dried out. 0.99

02:27:52.000 Your skin feels like shit. 0.99

02:27:54.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:27:55.000 I mean, look, you know, Western medicine is fantastic if you have, you know, an acute disorder.

02:28:00.000 I'm not like, you know, against Western medicine or pharmaceuticals when appropriate.

02:28:06.000 I just think that, you know, we're too quick to take them to, you know, deal with things that might be better addressed in other ways.

02:28:14.000 I agree, and it's also, why does it have to be one or the other?

02:28:17.000 Why does it have to be pharmaceutical drugs are evil or they're great?

02:28:21.000 No, it's like sometimes they're great, and sometimes they're evil.

02:28:24.000 And, you know, the problem is profit.

02:28:26.000 Once profit gets in the way, or profit gets into the mix, That becomes the sole thing you're chasing.

02:28:31.000 It's not like, let's make sure that what we're doing is the most beneficial to society and to human beings possible.

02:28:38.000 No.

02:28:39.000 Let's make sure we make a fuckload of money, the most money we could possibly make, because getting something passed by the FDA is a huge process.

02:28:46.000 It costs millions and millions of dollars.

02:28:48.000 So by the time you actually do get a product to market, you have to protect that product.

02:28:54.000 You have to protect that money.

02:28:55.000 It's all about money.

02:28:56.000 Money and profit.

02:28:57.000 The best thing to do is just be proactive enough about your health so that you can do whatever's under your control to prevent you from getting any kind of, you know, acute disease.

02:29:07.000 Not to say that it doesn't happen, because of course it does.

02:29:09.000 But, you know, I think there's lots of things that could be more deeply explored than, you know, our culture really is, you know, sort of permittable to in kind of our, you know, what we accept as mainstream or not.

02:29:25.000 Like I started recently Going to acupuncture, which I'd never done before. 0.94

02:29:30.000 Do you think it was bullshit before? 0.87

02:29:31.000 Yeah, I've done it. 0.99

02:29:32.000 No, I didn't think it was bullshit.

02:29:34.000 I mean, you know, I'm a pretty rational guy, you know, so the idea of sticking, you know, sort of like the idea of meridians and sticking needles into my forehead and all, you know, I was like, I didn't really, you know, I wasn't an immediate, you know, somebody who's going to immediately jump on that bandwagon.

02:29:50.000 But I know a lot of people who have benefited from it, and I was having some things that I wanted to address, like particularly sleep, like I've been challenged by sleep lately.

02:29:58.000 And so I went to see my friend who's a Chinese medicine doctor, and he started doing it on me, and it was really helpful.

02:30:06.000 It was really helpful.

02:30:07.000 It's so interesting, the idea of balancing energy systems and kind of how it works.

02:30:13.000 I mean, it's so ornate.

02:30:14.000 And this, you know, my friend who's, he's studying Chinese medicine and he's still kind of in his residency, so he's working underneath like this Chinese dude who's been practicing this forever.

02:30:24.000 And they come in and the guy, like literally this Chinese medicine doctor The only thing he wants to do is take my pulse on both wrists, and he takes it with his thumb in a couple different places.

02:30:38.000 And apparently his touch is so finely attuned that he can tell all kinds of things about where you're at based upon the pressure of your pulse and the frequency and the tempo and all these sorts of things.

02:30:50.000 So he wants to do that.

02:30:51.000 And then he wants to look at your tongue. 0.99

02:30:54.000 And he can tell by looking at your tongue all sorts of crazy shit about where you're at. 0.99

02:31:00.000 Do you believe it? 0.99

02:31:00.000 It's super interesting. 0.99

02:31:01.000 Do you believe it or do you believe in the possible placebo effect?

02:31:05.000 I think the placebo effect is powerful.

02:31:07.000 You know, I'm into, like, trying anything.

02:31:09.000 You know, why not, right?

02:31:11.000 Like, you know, contempt prior to investigation.

02:31:13.000 That's a good way to get...

02:31:15.000 Get hoodwinked?

02:31:16.000 Yeah, something's gonna happen.

02:31:17.000 Well, I mean, I think, yeah, but is that better than saying I'm not gonna explore that because I think it's BS without having any direct experience with it?

02:31:26.000 No, but I mean, it's nice to have some sort of proof of something, some sort of information.

02:31:29.000 I mean, how do you prove?

02:31:31.000 I mean, I think that, you know...

02:31:32.000 You run some tests.

02:31:35.000 Some tests on what?

02:31:36.000 Have the guy prove that he can actually do that?

02:31:38.000 Well, I mean, all I can tell you is that I was having issues with sleep and relaxation, and this seemed to benefit and alleviate my problem to some extent.

02:31:47.000 Right.

02:31:48.000 Is that placebo?

02:31:49.000 Is that the herbs that he prescribed me?

02:31:51.000 Is that the acupuncture?

02:31:52.000 It certainly could be those things because you got to think about like sleep oftentimes is psychological Oftentimes sleep is a matter of your ability to relax and we've all been in that situation before where you know You have to be at work in five hours and if I go to sleep right now I can get four hours sleep And you look at that clock and for whatever reason you're stuck in that thing because you know that you have to go to sleep right this moment and the pressure of that keeps you awake even if you're tired.

02:32:18.000 If you take action to try to alleviate that by acupuncture or whatever it is, just the mere act of taking action will shift your focus.

02:32:28.000 Into a cure and you can oftentimes start thinking that whatever this placebo effect is, is real.

02:32:34.000 I'm not doubting that this guy has a real, a possible gift or whatever it is, but wouldn't it be nice if we just can prove it?

02:32:43.000 Like wouldn't you want to prove that?

02:32:44.000 Wouldn't you want to just work with a bunch of people and find out, oh look, you know, he's right, this guy does have a gallbladder issue or he's right, this guy does. 1.00

02:32:51.000 I just met a lot of fuckers. 0.99

02:32:54.000 Yeah, or doing your TV show. 1.00

02:32:55.000 Zone healers and all these crap. 0.95

02:32:57.000 You're becoming much more cynical about this kind of stuff.

02:33:00.000 Even before that, there was a guy that was working with all these MMA guys that I know, and he was a zone healer.

02:33:05.000 And he would press the back of your head and tell you from the spots that he was pressing what was wrong with you. 0.99

02:33:13.000 But it was bullshit. 0.99

02:33:14.000 He would press harder here. 0.99

02:33:16.000 Does that hurt when I do that? 1.00

02:33:17.000 Like, yeah, because you're pressing harder, stupid. 1.00

02:33:19.000 What do you think, I'm dumb? 1.00

02:33:20.000 And we had this conversation. 0.98

02:33:21.000 I'm like, how exactly is this working?

02:33:23.000 And he was like, well, your body's ability to heal itself is dependent upon freeing your energy.

02:33:29.000 How does that work?

02:33:30.000 How does that work?

02:33:31.000 And after badgering him with a bunch of different questions, he essentially admitted it was all placebo effect. 0.99

02:33:36.000 I was like, Jesus fucking Christ. 0.99

02:33:38.000 And he was charging like $160 to get adjusted and he would touch your head. 1.00

02:33:42.000 Was this part of your show?

02:33:43.000 No, this is a dude that I knew that was in the mixed martial arts world.

02:33:48.000 He was dealing with all these different fighters and jiu-jitsu guys that had back injuries.

02:33:53.000 And he was a good chiropractor.

02:33:54.000 But this zone healing thing, as he was getting into it, the more I would listen to it, I was like, okay, what?

02:33:59.000 You're telling me you could touch the back of someone's head and press spots and tell if they have a thyroid condition? 0.99

02:34:05.000 Get the fuck out of here. 1.00

02:34:07.000 That's not true. 0.99

02:34:08.000 That's just not true.

02:34:09.000 And he kind of admitted it wasn't true.

02:34:12.000 He kind of admitted that ultimately what he's doing is, if you believe in what he's doing, it will fix what you have that's wrong with you.

02:34:21.000 Because ultimately, there's another great Radiolab podcast on placebo effect.

02:34:28.000 And there was one of them where they were talking about this guy They hypnotized this kid with this insane wart problem, skin warts. 0.88

02:34:37.000 Have you ever seen people that have warts all over their skin?

02:34:39.000 Where it becomes incurable by medication and they convinced this kid that they had hypnotized him and that it was going to go away and it went away on his arm.

02:34:49.000 His arm was like completely free of warts, which just never happens when someone reaches such an acute level of infection like this kid had.

02:34:59.000 And so in a sense, It is real.

02:35:02.000 In a sense, it's not hooey.

02:35:04.000 As long as you're gullible, as long as you're willing to wholeheartedly jump in and believe it.

02:35:11.000 And I think that might be what's going on with acupuncture.

02:35:14.000 That might be what's going on with a lot of, you know, quote-unquote Chinese medicine or Eastern medicine.

02:35:20.000 I think if you believe that they have found you a cure, your body starts producing whatever it actually needs to fix whatever ailment you have, and thus it becomes actually effective.

02:35:32.000 So the method is not correct.

02:35:35.000 The method is a trick, but that trick is effective.

02:35:40.000 And that effective trick does convince your brain to fix whatever the problem is.

02:35:44.000 And it's really baffling.

02:35:46.000 And it only works if you're not a discerning, critical person.

02:35:51.000 Because if you're a discerning person who's skeptical, it's not going to work.

02:35:54.000 Because then you're going to hyper-analyze whatever it is, or the potential possibilities of whatever it is, and it just won't work.

02:36:03.000 Which is weird.

02:36:04.000 There's no shortage of snake oil salesmen pitching all kinds of crazy healing techniques, you know, no doubt.

02:36:11.000 But I think that in fairness, you know, acupuncture and traditions of Chinese medicine, these go back, you know, hundreds if not thousands of years.

02:36:18.000 So does witchcraft. 0.75

02:36:20.000 So does slavery.

02:36:21.000 Yeah, but people are not going to see witchcraft doctors in West LA. Well, they would.

02:36:25.000 Believe me.

02:36:26.000 They would.

02:36:28.000 I think that the history and the sort of traditions behind it, there is merit there.

02:36:34.000 Is there, though?

02:36:35.000 But what scientifically?

02:36:36.000 I don't know.

02:36:37.000 I mean, I'm the wrong guy to ask about that, I think.

02:36:39.000 But if you're the wrong guy to ask about that, you're probably the wrong guy to talk about it, though, right?

02:36:43.000 Maybe.

02:36:43.000 Yeah, probably.

02:36:44.000 Yeah.

02:36:45.000 Probably.

02:36:46.000 But I think that...

02:36:47.000 I mean, listen, you know, I just know from my friend who's been studying this, I mean, he's been in school, like, for crazy long periods of time.

02:36:54.000 But do you say school?

02:36:55.000 Do you do air quotes?

02:36:56.000 No, I think it's, you know, it's essentially like medical school.

02:37:00.000 It's nothing like medical school.

02:37:01.000 How about that?

02:37:02.000 You're sticking needles in people and lighting little incense.

02:37:04.000 But in terms of, like, studying physiology and studying chemistry and organic chemistry and all that kinds of things.

02:37:09.000 Right, but it's like on energy meridians and chakras and all that jazz, right?

02:37:14.000 I mean, isn't that what it's kind of based on?

02:37:16.000 There's some aspects of that, for sure.

02:37:18.000 But there's a lot of herbal medicine, I think, too.

02:37:22.000 For whatever reason, I thought you said urban medicine?

02:37:26.000 No, you know, the study of herbs.

02:37:30.000 Yeah.

02:37:30.000 Right.

02:37:30.000 I mean, there's certainly some herbs that have medicinal values.

02:37:34.000 One of my favorite herbs has massive amounts of medicinal values.

02:37:39.000 Oregano.

02:37:41.000 Marijuana.

02:37:42.000 But I just think that the sticking the needles in you, it's probably more that you're doing something.

02:37:49.000 You're doing something to deal with it, and in doing something, your body reacts.

02:37:53.000 You know, the weirdest thing about drugs...

02:37:55.000 Isn't that kind of half of what, like, sort of psychotherapy is, too?

02:37:59.000 Sure.

02:37:59.000 Just the willingness to show up for it is, you know, to walk through the door and to engage somebody else is almost, you know...

02:38:07.000 No doubt.

02:38:07.000 Half the battle.

02:38:08.000 Yeah, no doubt.

02:38:09.000 There's definitely merit to that.

02:38:11.000 I mean, and also, like I said, like, the idea of any, you know, fill in the blank, whatever type of modality, any type of therapy that's actually effective, even though it doesn't have any real scientific basis to it, The effect is still real.

02:38:25.000 You still get a benefit from it. 0.94

02:38:27.000 Like, this zone healing shit. 0.98

02:38:29.000 Like, if you believe in it, it will affect you. 0.99

02:38:31.000 Which is kind of fucking crazy. 0.89

02:38:33.000 It's kind of crazy that, in some ways, there's merit to it. 0.97

02:38:39.000 Well, I mean, let's just talk about meditation and mindfulness practices, right?

02:38:44.000 So if you want to apply your sort of, you know, analytical perspective to that, you can draw the same conclusions.

02:38:51.000 Really?

02:38:51.000 I could tell you, well, I mean, listen, anybody who is a consistent, who has a consistent meditation practice will tell you that, you know, it improves their life.

02:38:59.000 Right, but do you know that...

02:39:00.000 So is that a placebo?

02:39:02.000 No.

02:39:03.000 Like, is there a provable, you know, thing that, you know, sort of, could you apply that same, you know, litmus test to that?

02:39:12.000 Because this is another sort of non-Western, you know, approach to, you know, being healthier.

02:39:18.000 But there's been a lot of studies done on meditation.

02:39:20.000 I'm sure there's been.

02:39:20.000 There's been a lot of studies done on the effectiveness of mindfulness and the actual effect on the mind.

02:39:27.000 But it's an ethereal thing, right?

02:39:30.000 Yes, but it's not lying to you.

02:39:33.000 It's not saying that this frog potion that I give you is going to cure your cancer and then your body cures the cancer.

02:39:40.000 There's a certain aspect of meditation that's undeniably beneficial.

02:39:44.000 But that aspect of it has really been scientifically analyzed.

02:39:49.000 They've done all these fMRI scans on people that are Buddhist monks that have spent years and years meditation.

02:39:55.000 They've done scans on people that were in, you know, deep REM sleep and different stages of the mind.

02:40:02.000 I mean, there's a lot of scientific work that's been done on, you know, what we call meditation, achieving certain brain waves, achieving certain states.

02:40:11.000 Those aren't fake.

02:40:13.000 And in a sense, placebo effect isn't fake either, right?

02:40:18.000 Because every drug that exists, exists because there's a receptor for it in the human mind.

02:40:25.000 The reason why those drugs are effective is because the mind knows how to actually produce that effect in some sort of limited quantity on its own.

02:40:33.000 That's one of the reasons why placebo effects work.

02:40:36.000 That's the reason why we have opiate receptors and cannabinoid receptors and all these different things and processes that the mind can engage in with or without medication.

02:40:47.000 That's why those medications have an effect on the body.

02:40:50.000 So in that sense, placebos If you believe in them, work. 1.00

02:40:55.000 There really is something there.

02:40:57.000 Isn't it even more than that, though?

02:40:58.000 Like the placebo effect works even when you know it's a placebo.

02:41:02.000 Sometimes.

02:41:03.000 Right?

02:41:03.000 Sometimes, but not as much.

02:41:05.000 There was, yeah.

02:41:06.000 Yeah, there was.

02:41:07.000 And that's, I think, what we're talking about, just doing something.

02:41:10.000 The act of doing something to deal with it makes you focus on whatever that issue is.

02:41:16.000 You know, I mean how many issues that people have health-wise are just due to a complete lack of awareness of their physical body?

02:41:24.000 Just stumbling through life on this drunken momentum of coffee and donuts and stress and cigarettes and traffic and pollution and stress and cigarettes and coffee, and then just Just the mere act of taking the time to reassess what it means to be a person,

02:41:45.000 to just stop and pause and give thought to your day-to-day existence, might be enough to reset a lot of the processes that are in place.

02:41:56.000 Yeah.

02:41:57.000 I mean, it's been huge in my life.

02:41:59.000 I mean, it's so counterintuitive.

02:42:02.000 Like, I would rather go out and do a four-hour run than sit down for 20 minutes in the morning before I leave the house and engage in that practice.

02:42:09.000 And, you know, over the last six or eight months, I've really kind of dedicated myself to it, you know, by prioritizing it.

02:42:18.000 And it's really, it has been great.

02:42:21.000 What do you do?

02:42:22.000 How do you do it?

02:42:24.000 I've played around with so many different techniques over the years.

02:42:27.000 You were talking about momentum earlier, right?

02:42:30.000 I've never been able to hit momentum with it.

02:42:32.000 I'll do it for a couple days, this version, that version, and I could never find a way to really stick with it.

02:42:41.000 And I downloaded the Headspace app, which is an iPhone app.

02:42:45.000 It's got guided meditation programs on it.

02:42:48.000 It started by this dude, Andy Pudicombe, who I've had on my podcast recently because I became so fascinated with this guy.

02:43:03.000 Yeah.

02:43:17.000 Just something about the ease of that, I guess.

02:43:20.000 I've been able to kind of just do it and create momentum around it.

02:43:24.000 And like anything else, once you have momentum, and once you start to see the benefits of it, then you're more, you know, enthusiastic about pursuing it further.

02:43:32.000 And it's been cool.

02:43:33.000 And this guy, he's really, he's a cool dude.

02:43:35.000 He's like...

02:43:36.000 He's a British dude and he was in college.

02:43:38.000 What's his name again?

02:43:39.000 Andy Puddicombe.

02:43:41.000 P-U-D-D-I-C-O-M-B-E. He has a great TED Talk, by the way.

02:43:47.000 But he grew up in London and dropped out of college and went to Nepal and started studying Buddhist meditation and became a Buddhist monk.

02:43:57.000 And he lived basically in relative seclusion for like 10 years as like a Buddhist monk practicing meditation.

02:44:04.000 Whoa.

02:44:04.000 And then he had this kind of post-modern Siddhartha moment where he realized, like, you know, I need to go back to the West.

02:44:10.000 He had this calling to come back and be a teacher.

02:44:13.000 And he started this company, Headspace, that's become huge.

02:44:16.000 They've got, like, over a million subscribers on this app.

02:44:19.000 He's developed this huge business around it.

02:44:21.000 And he's very accessible.

02:44:22.000 Like, he's friendly and engaging and very modern.

02:44:25.000 And, you know, he's sort of like...

02:44:26.000 Where does he live?

02:44:27.000 He lives here in Venice now.

02:44:29.000 He moved from London.

02:44:29.000 He lives here in Venice.

02:44:30.000 He's a cool dude.

02:44:31.000 Yeah, there he is.

02:44:33.000 And then he, right before he, once he decided he wasn't going to be a monk anymore, and before he kind of returned west, he studied circus arts at the Moscow College of Circus.

02:44:45.000 Circus arts?

02:44:47.000 Yeah, like he became like...

02:44:48.000 Face painting?

02:44:48.000 No, like Cirque du Soleil type stuff.

02:44:52.000 So he's got like this crazy skill set.

02:44:54.000 And during his TED Talk, he's like juggling the whole time.

02:44:56.000 Really?

02:44:57.000 He's cool, dude.

02:44:59.000 What benefits have you found from this meditation?

02:45:02.000 The biggest thing that I found is that I'm able to navigate stressful situations much more gracefully.

02:45:10.000 I'm far less reactive to people.

02:45:14.000 I'm able to kind of calmly take information out, engage it, and then respond more mindfully.

02:45:20.000 And I'm able to, you know, I've got a lot of stuff going on right now.

02:45:24.000 It's like, you know, it's just, and to be able to kind of not get anxious over that and just be able to say, okay, you know, focus on one thing at a time and not get worked up about the smaller stuff.

02:45:35.000 And just ultimately, much more productive and constructive in my interactions with other people, focused when I'm working, present with my wife and my kids.

02:45:45.000 And calmer.

02:45:47.000 And that's impacted my sleep as well.

02:45:49.000 It's been cool.

02:45:50.000 I mean, it's been...

02:45:51.000 You know, I think the benefits have exceeded what I expected.

02:45:56.000 I don't know how...

02:45:56.000 You know, I didn't expect it to be any crazy difference, but it's been really great.

02:46:00.000 And it's sort of like...

02:46:01.000 It's powerful, too, to be able to kind of stand in your space and not get rattled by things.

02:46:07.000 Like, that's a pretty potent sort of skill to develop.

02:46:11.000 Like, just imagine yourself...

02:46:15.000 You're at work.

02:46:16.000 Your boss is coming at you.

02:46:17.000 He accuses you unfairly of something.

02:46:21.000 Your buttons are pushed.

02:46:23.000 You're on autopilot.

02:46:24.000 You react in a certain way.

02:46:25.000 But to be able to reprogram yourself and go, I have a choice here.

02:46:30.000 My brain is saying this, but...

02:46:33.000 I don't have to engage in that pattern.

02:46:35.000 I can actually tell a different story and react in a different way.

02:46:40.000 I think that's a pretty powerful life skill that's worth developing.

02:46:45.000 Yeah, no doubt.

02:46:46.000 No doubt.

02:46:47.000 That's very cool.

02:46:48.000 I'm going to look into that.

02:46:49.000 I'm definitely going to download that app and check out him.

02:46:51.000 That's fascinating stuff.

02:46:53.000 Yeah, it's good stuff. 0.98

02:46:54.000 Do you ever fuck around with a sensory deprivation tag? 0.98

02:46:57.000 I've been wanting to do that for so long. 0.99

02:47:00.000 I want to go to the float lab in Venice.

02:47:02.000 I've got a friend who's got a tank.

02:47:03.000 I know you're big into that.

02:47:04.000 I know that I would really dig it.

02:47:06.000 Yeah, I have a tank.

02:47:07.000 I have a tank in my basement.

02:47:08.000 You probably talked about this a ton on your show already, but if you could encapsulate the benefits of that.

02:47:16.000 It removes the mind from the body, the influence of the body, and all the stimuli of the world evaporates.

02:47:28.000 It's the mind untethered from the body in a very weird way.

02:47:32.000 And the way I always describe it is if we were having this conversation, but right next to us there are people screaming at the top of their lungs, it would be very distracting.

02:47:39.000 We would want to go, let's go talk over here.

02:47:41.000 And that screaming is information, it's stimuli, it's stimulus.

02:47:47.000 You're constantly getting it right now.

02:47:49.000 Even though these are very comfortable ergonomic chairs from the Ergo Depot, Capisco chairs.

02:47:55.000 Very good for your posture.

02:47:56.000 My back used to kill me at the end of every show.

02:48:00.000 But because of these chairs, it's really fantastic.

02:48:03.000 But you're still in a chair. 1.00

02:48:04.000 Your ass is pushing against it. 1.00

02:48:07.000 You feel the weight of your body. 1.00

02:48:08.000 You're moving around.

02:48:09.000 There's a desk in front of you.

02:48:11.000 We have visual cues.

02:48:12.000 We're hearing things.

02:48:13.000 We have earphones on.

02:48:14.000 There's all this stuff that's going on constantly that...

02:48:17.000 We look at it as the world, but really what it is is data.

02:48:21.000 It's data coming into your brain that your brain has to process, and that data, life itself, is a distraction.

02:48:27.000 In that tank, there is no data.

02:48:30.000 I mean, you have a very limited amount of sensation of the fact that you're in water that will eventually go away if you stay still long enough.

02:48:37.000 The water is the same temperature as your skin, so you will get to a point where you don't feel it.

02:48:42.000 There's a thousand pounds of salt in that water, so you'll float effortlessly.

02:48:47.000 And you're in total darkness.

02:48:49.000 And as long as there's no banging around the room, as long as you're in a good silent area, you will experience quiet in a way that you never get.

02:49:00.000 You will experience physical quiet.

02:49:02.000 There will be no input.

02:49:04.000 And the absence of that input...

02:49:05.000 Your brain becomes supercharged.

02:49:08.000 It makes it so much easier for me to understand influences, objectives, all the things that I have been pushing to the back of my brain, avoiding, come to light instantaneously, highlighted.

02:49:21.000 All issues become highlighted.

02:49:23.000 Any stumbling blocks, any things that you really need to address, all come to the forefront.

02:49:28.000 And the way I describe it is the first 20 minutes or so seem like Like a seminar on my life.

02:49:37.000 Like my life is being explained to me.

02:49:40.000 If I went to a guru that could explain to me in no uncertain terms, like someone who really knows every aspect of my life, like if you could plug a USB drive into my head into some supercomputer that can fix things, they'd go, oh, well, look at all these issues you have.

02:49:55.000 You have to get rid of this, clean out this clutter, stop doing that because you don't like it, don't do this, don't hang out with this person.

02:50:03.000 Hang out with that person more.

02:50:05.000 Concentrate more on this aspect of your life.

02:50:07.000 Just creatively, it's an unbelievable tool.

02:50:11.000 I go over jujitsu techniques in the tank.

02:50:14.000 I go over transitions.

02:50:16.000 I go over stand-up comedy in there.

02:50:17.000 I go over everything in there.

02:50:19.000 Yeah, that's great.

02:50:20.000 I want to check it out.

02:50:21.000 I mean, it sounds...

02:50:21.000 The way that you describe that is very similar to the experiences that I have when I'm in long distance running and training.

02:50:29.000 I'm sure.

02:50:29.000 It's that...

02:50:30.000 You know, it's different because your heart's beating and it's kind of an active meditation version of that.

02:50:35.000 But, you know, it's so powerful.

02:50:37.000 You know, and the more that I learn about this world of mindfulness, it's just...

02:50:42.000 It's untapped reservoirs of, you know, personal potential.

02:50:46.000 Exactly.

02:50:47.000 And, you know, again, it goes back to, you know, Western culture priorities.

02:50:53.000 Like, this is not, you know, the float lab, like your tank, that's not a mainstream idea.

02:50:59.000 You know what I mean?

02:51:00.000 It's becoming more so, but yeah.

02:51:02.000 But I mean, to look, the typical American, right?

02:51:04.000 You know what I mean?

02:51:05.000 It's kind of a foreign idea.

02:51:07.000 But this idea that, you know, your thinking mind is distinct from your higher consciousness.

02:51:13.000 And to the extent that you have control and you can harness your thinking mind for your benefit and you're able to, you know, silence the idle negative chatter.

02:51:22.000 You know, most people, like you said, you know, it's coffee, you know, donuts, whatever.

02:51:27.000 There's a looping, you know, and my mind loops as much as the next person.

02:51:31.000 And generally, it's not very kind things that are looping.

02:51:35.000 You know, self-defeatist ideas, negative thoughts.

02:51:38.000 Oh, my God, I'm going to do Joe Rogan's podcast.

02:51:40.000 What if the death squad army gangs up on me?

02:51:43.000 You know, what's going to happen?

02:51:44.000 You know, like, whatever it is, you know what I mean?

02:51:46.000 Like, it's And meditation allows you to understand that you don't have to engage in that and gives you a toolbox to say, let me tell a different story.

02:51:57.000 I don't have to entertain that story, that story that I've been listening to my entire life that's led me down a certain path in my life and helped sort of forge a certain trajectory.

02:52:06.000 What if I tell a new story?

02:52:10.000 And let's put that story together and see where that leads.

02:52:13.000 Like, could there be anything more powerful than that?

02:52:15.000 Very few things.

02:52:17.000 Acting on those positive thoughts.

02:52:20.000 That's just as powerful, if not more.

02:52:22.000 That's it.

02:52:22.000 Yeah, and uninstalling those buttons that cause you to react and create negative consequences for you.

02:52:31.000 That's a good way to end this podcast, Rich Roll.

02:52:33.000 Yeah.

02:52:33.000 That was three hours of awesome.

02:52:34.000 Was it?

02:52:35.000 Yeah.

02:52:35.000 We did it already.

02:52:36.000 Thanks, dude.

02:52:37.000 Bam.

02:52:37.000 It's done.

02:52:38.000 Thank you.

02:52:38.000 Awesome, man.

02:52:38.000 Your podcast available on iTunes.

02:52:41.000 What is the name of it?

02:52:41.000 How do people get it?

02:52:42.000 The Rich Roll Podcast.

02:52:43.000 Perfect name.

02:52:44.000 Absolutely.

02:52:45.000 Can I pitch my book?

02:52:45.000 No confusion.

02:52:46.000 Please do.

02:52:46.000 Can I pitch my book here?

02:52:48.000 Plant Power Way.

02:52:49.000 Plant Power Way, out this week.

02:52:51.000 Oh, is it out this week?

02:52:52.000 Cookbook and Lifestyle Guide for the Modern Family.

02:52:54.000 Oh, excellent.

02:52:54.000 Cookbook and Lifestyle Guide.

02:52:56.000 That's right.

02:52:57.000 All right, man.

02:52:58.000 It's awesome.

02:52:59.000 Thank you very much.

02:53:00.000 Awesome.

02:53:00.000 Beautiful.

02:53:00.000 Thanks for having me, dude.

02:53:01.000 Anytime, man.

02:53:02.000 We're local, so let's do this more often.

02:53:05.000 Not once every two years or something.

02:53:06.000 When was the last time we did it?

02:53:07.000 I'm down, man.

02:53:07.000 I'd love to have you on my show, too, if you're right for it.

02:53:09.000 I would love to, and I'm excited that you have a show, too.

02:53:11.000 You're a really interesting and fun guy.

02:53:13.000 Yeah, man.

02:53:14.000 Thank you.

02:53:14.000 Thank you very much.

02:53:15.000 Rich Roll, ladies and gentlemen, you can find him on Twitter, richroll.com, richroll.com, and check out his podcast, check out his book, The Plant Power Way, available right now, you fucks. 0.97

02:53:27.000 Absolutely. 0.98

02:53:27.000 Go get it. 0.98

02:53:28.000 Peace.

02:53:28.000 Thank you, man.

02:53:31.000 Yay.

The Joe Rogan Experience - May 01, 2015

Joe Rogan Experience #642 - Rich Roll

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